Good News. Yes, there is Good News even in a world like ours today. True, there is a great deal of bad news – bad news communicated and promoted by media whose agenda is to grab our attention and to hold it.
The method of the media is hype and sensation, no matter what the cost to the Truth, the cost to our human sensibilities, the cost to our sense of trust in other people. Bad news hits the headlines, and the good news goes by the wayside. Such is the mindset of the world we live in. The bad is venerated – yes, it is what we give time and attention to; the good is overlooked in a world given to dwelling on what is wrong rather than promoting what is right and good.
But this is all evidence of the prevalence of the principle of the bad in humanity. What is not right; what is unwholesome; what is perverse; what is sensational; what sets one person or group of people against another. It will not change because deep within the psyche of human beings is something the Bible calls SIN. The deep rooted taint on our God given, God like image. Sin. A stain on our otherwise amazing make-up as human beings – beings capable of so much technically and so much that is constructive and good. Yet our capacity is warped and turned to destructive ends.
We make weapons; we trade in weapons; we use them. Millions today are displaced and go hungry and in need of basic shelter and warmth. Yet geo-political relations are predicated on force and the willingness to use violence no matter what the consequence.
And the consequences are there in our rape and abuse of our natural environment. We are now approaching the stage of so polluting our planet and so using up its resources that we put our very existence at risk.
Now, I am not concerned here to promote any particular political viewpoint or to criticise any. This sin factor is in play right across all human activity and it comes out in every political system. I merely cite these issues as fundamental realities which we refuse to address because we refuse to address the fundamental problem of our existence which this this:
Our estrangement from God our Maker – the God who made us; the God who cares for us; the God who provides in his creation all that is needful for us. Yet the one whom we readily overlook and ignore. Indeed many reject God our Creator as part of the problem – nothing could be further from the truth.
God is not our problem – God is our Solution to all the problems cited, and to all that could be cited.
And God says that the problem is in us; and God says that the solution is with him.
The Gospel Evangelist writer, Mark, opens his record of the life of Jesus Christ with these words.
The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God
That word Gospel is the Anglo Saxon rendering of the New Testament Greek word, EVANGEL and that means GOOD NEWS !
GOOD NEWS !
Yes, in this world racked by wars, by displacement, by terrible need, by crime and social breakdown, there is still Good News.
That Good News is centred on the life, death, resurrection and ministry of Jesus Christ: –
God himself come in human form to show us the way to live and to die in order to live, correctly in the here and now and eternally in the hereafter.
Just imagine if everyone on earth followed the teaching and example of Jesus Christ !
No wars, no famines, no crime – nothing negative and bad for the media to report !
Perfect harmony.
It won’t happen, of course, because most people refuse to follow Jesus Christ teaching and example. And that is the core of the problem.
Refusal to obey Christ. That is the essence of the meaning of the word, SIN.
Sin is rebellion against God’s teaching and God’s order for our lives. In fact the heart of sin is rebellion against the Person of God himself.
We choose to be god in our own lives; we refuse to allow God to be God in our lives, even though he actually is God our Maker.
We are rebels and we insist on being our own god. We refuse God for who he is and what that means for our lives – to surrender control to him. To obey and honour him – and to disobey our own SELF-ish desires and wants.
It is in facing that FACT OF LIFE that we can find the way to be free from sin and from the fearful consequence of our slavery to our sin.
The very fact that we refuse to believe in God our maker as described in the Bible is itself Sin. And that is why we have problems.
What is the first step to recovery for any addict whose life is a mess ?
To face the truth. To face up to where our sin has led us, and to stop indulging our sin. To stop living in sin. To stop behaving in the ways which cause us such misery and self harm. To recognise that it is wrong and to forsake it. To stop indulging it. To refuse it.
That is what we read about in the first verses of Mark’s Gospel account in chapter 1 in this beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
We read first and foremost about John the Baptist, and we read this about his ministry.
We read in verse 3 of chapter 1 that John was the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah’s prediction some 4 centuries earlier [as recorded in chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah in the Bible]:
prepare ye the way of the Lord
And how did he prepare that way ?
By preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins
Our subject next time !
Christian Preacher
Christianity 