Firstly, I need to apologise: When we went into lockdown I sent out a number of blog postings relating to how we as Christians should come to terms with lockdown and what we should be looking to get out of it as those to whom God had promised that “all things will work together for our good”. However, I have not sent out any now that we are moving out of lockdown – I was so looking foward to resuming church that I didn’t give enough thought to some who might have serious concerns as to whether or not to come out to church. Please accept my apology and over the next few days, starting today, I will try to redress the situation.
Here is where I want us to start: what a wrong forward assurance looks like.
Hopefully one thing that many will have learned from this lockdown is that they have no real control over their own future. Indeed they can have no true expectation to even having a future! Surely what we are seeing every day around this world is that men, women, children, whether rich or poor, black or white, old or young, are all faced with the possibility of becoming infected with this virus and possibly as a result – dying.
So one essential when we look to our coming out of this lockdown is to avoid going back to a wrong assurance concerning the future. James addresses it well when he writes:
Jas 4:13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—
Jas 4:14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
Jas 4:15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
Jas 4:16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Jas 4:17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Compare with that what a right forward assurance looks like:
The first thing, as a Christian, I must recognise in coming out of lockdown is that I am no more likely to die tomorrow whether I am in lockdown or out; I can build all sorts of “safe guards” into my life (I can live in a plastic bubble for the rest of it if I so choose), but at the end of the day, what actually happens to me tomorrow is in God’s choosing, and in His hands, alone.
That certainly doesn’t mean we treat life lightly, or disregard sensible warnings, any more than we walk in front of buses trusting in God to preserve us! BUT when all is said and done, here is where we rest: God has all of my tomorrows in His hands and He knows what He is going to do with them, and I rest well content with that!
David certainly had the right of it when he wrote:
Psa 139:15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Psa 139:16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
Praise God that whilst the future is still so uncertain to us, God is already there waiting to walk it with us!