Some people are at their best in the morning, some people are at their best in the evening. Some people are never at their best! If I’m at my best at any time of day, it’s in the morning. I wake up really early, I feel quite lively. But as the day goes on, I get more and more tired, and by 9 o’clock I’m beginning to fall asleep. By 10 o’clock I really want to be in bed, and by 11 o’clock I’m asleep wherever I am!
And I’ve always been like that. Even when I was a student, I was always in bed by 10 o’clock at night – and that is really sad! So I had a bit of a reputation at the university that I was at for this. But what happened was this. Towards the end of my time at university, there was a May Ball, and at this May Ball I met up with someone who I’d known a little bit before: a young woman about the same age as me. And we got chatting, and we started dancing. And 11 o’clock came and I didn’t really notice, and 2 o’clock came, and 5 o’clock came, and 7 o’clock in the morning we started playing tennis. I didn’t even feel remotely tired.
And the word went around the university we were definitely going to get married – and we did! That was Pips! The point was I had fallen in love. My life was never the same again. The old life had gone. A new life had begun.
In other words, he says: relationships are really exciting! And the most exciting relationship of all is a relationship with God.
He says: ‘Those who become Christians.’ What does that mean? What does the word ‘Christian’ mean? The word ‘Christian’ now has quite negative connotations sometimes. But for other people, it’s quite a positive word. People think, ‘Well, Christian – that means a “nice person”.’
But does it?
Because many atheists are extremely nice people, but they wouldn’t want to be known as Christians, because they’re not.
Other people say, ‘Well, surely we’re all Christians because we’re born in a Christian country.’ But being born in a Christian country doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than being born in a McDonald’s would make you a hamburger! It doesn’t follow.
So what is a Christian? A Christian is a Christ-ian: someone who follows Jesus, someone who puts their faith in Jesus Christ. And, of course, how that happens varies enormously. For some people, like for me, there’s a very definite moment:
For other people, they’d say: ‘Well, do you know, I’ve always been a Christian.’ I hope my children will be able to say that, that ‘I’ve never known a time in my life when I wasn’t a Christian. I was brought up like that, and I’m still a Christian.’
Other people would say, ‘Well, I think at one point I wasn’t a Christian, but I am a Christian now. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened.’ That’s fine. C. S. Lewis used the analogy: if you’re on a train from Paris to Berlin, some people know the exact moment they cross the border. Other people might have been asleep; they don’t know that. But what matters is that you know that you’re in Berlin. And what matters is that you know that you’re a Christian now, if that’s what you would like.
And what the New Testament says is that we can know that we’re a Christian.
What St John is saying there is this is the closest possible intimate relationship of love. It’s like a child and a parent. In other places, it’s talked about like a lover, or like a friend. And sometimes the New Testament even uses the analogy of a husband and wife – it’s that close: an intimate relationship.
Now, if you are married, you know that you’re married. If you’re a Christian, you can know that you’re a Christian.
At the end of the course, we have a questionnaire. And I’m so grateful to people for how honest they are in their feedback. At the end of one course, we asked this question: ‘Would you have called yourself a Christian at the beginning of Alpha?’ One person wrote this: ‘Yes, but without any real experience of a relationship with God.’ Another person wrote: ‘Sort of.’ Another person wrote: ‘In inverted commas.’ Another person wrote: ‘Not sure.’ Another: ‘Ish.’ Another: ‘Yes, though, looking back, possibly no.’
Now, you know if you’re in a relationship. Supposing you said to my wife Pippa, ‘Pips, are you married?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but without any real experience of a relationship’ or ‘Sort of’ or ‘In inverted commas’ or ‘Not sure’ or ‘Ish’ or ‘Yes, though, looking back, possibly no’. God wants you to know.
You can know that you’re a Christian; you can know that you have faith; you can know that you have eternal life. So what is this faith, this confidence, this assurance based on? Well, it’s based on like three legs of a tripod, and each of them is essential.
The first is this: the word of God. It’s based on facts and not on feelings. Because our feelings go up and down. But the facts remain the facts.
So, using this analogy of marriage, If you asked me how do I know I’m married, I can point you to this: this is our marriage certificate. This is a document that is evidence that we are married. If you asked me how I know I’m a Christian, I would point to a document: I would point to the word of God.
Sometimes people say like, you know, ‘It’s fine for you – you have faith. You’re lucky. But I don’t have faith,’ as if you either have it or you don’t have it and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s not like that.
Now, maybe this is something you’ve already experienced, just in the first two or three weeks of Alpha. You come here and you hear this being explained, and you think: ‘I’m beginning to have a little bit of faith.’
Another way that you can do it is by just reading the Bible on your own – reading one of the Gospels.
That’s what I did: I read the New Testament. I didn’t have any faith before – I was an atheist. But by the time I’d come to the end of the New Testament, I had experienced faith.
This is a way we can interact with God. God speaks through the Bible – we’ll have a whole session on this subject. But you can begin to take the word of God and start to put it into practice. Let me give you an example.
There’s a verse, which comes – a promise – which comes towards the end of the New Testament. It’s a very famous verse in Revelation 3:20 where Jesus says this:
Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, he illustrated this verse with a painting. In fact, he painted it three times. The most famous one hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral and it’s called ‘The Light of the World’. And this is what this verse is saying: imagine that your life is like a house and Jesus is knocking at the door of your life and he’s saying: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. I’d like to come into your life, into the house of your life, and be part of your life. I want to come in and eat with you.’
Eating together is a sign of friendship. And effectively Jesus is saying, ‘I want to be your friend.’ That’s what it means to be a Christian: it’s to be a friend of Jesus. And Jesus is saying, ‘Look, here I am. I am standing at the door of your life, and I would love to come in and eat with you, be a friend of you.’
And if you look at this painting, you see that the door is overgrown with thorns and thistles. It’s like the person’s never opened the door to Jesus. And Jesus is knocking. Now, when Holman Hunt painted this painting, people said: ‘That’s a great painting!’ But someone said to him, ‘Look, you’ve actually made a mistake! Do you realise you’ve made a mistake?’ And he said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’
He said, ‘Well, look at the door: there’s no handle.’ And Holman Hunt said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not a mistake. There is a handle. But the handle is on the inside.’
In other words, Jesus is not going to force his way into your life. He stands at the door and knocks, and he leaves it up to you and me to decide whether to invite him in, to be part of our lives.
But his promise is this: ‘If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.’ Not ‘I might come in,’ not ‘I’ll think about it’: you can be sure that if you invite him in, he will always be with you. He’ll never leave you. And he says this relationship is not just for now; it’s for eternity. That’s what we looked at when we looked at the resurrection: Jesus is alive now! He can be in a relationship with you now. And that relationship goes beyond this life – it goes on into eternity.
So that’s the first leg of the tripod: the word of God.
The second leg of the tripod is the work of Jesus. It’s done, not do.
If you asked me how do I know I’m married, I can point to the marriage certificate. I could also point to an event that took place right here on 7 January 1978, when our wedding took place. And if you asked me how do I know I’m a Christian, I can point to an event in history: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Sometimes people say, ‘Well, I don’t think I could be a Christian because I’m not good enough. And if I was going to be a Christian, there are lots of things in my life I’d just need to sort out first. I need to change things,’ and so on. No, no, no. You come exactly as you are. It’s not about what you do or what you can achieve; it’s about what has been done for you by Jesus on the cross. That’s what we were looking at last week. You receive total forgiveness. And you receive it as a gift.
The free gift. I don’t know what you feel when you hear that expression, ‘free gift’. I know for me, I think, ‘Uh-uh, no, I don’t believe that! There’s bound to be a catch.’ We’re deeply suspicious of anyone who offers us a free gift.
Pippa and I were out for a walk in St James’s Park with my daughter and son-in-law, and it was raining. We popped into the café to get some coffee. And my son-in-law Myles ordered a café latte, and there was a bit of a mix-up and he got two café lattes by mistake. And he said, ‘No, no, I don’t want this one.’ And they said, ‘Well, no, no, you can have that one for free.’ So he offered it to us. We didn’t want it. He said, ‘Okay, I’m going to go and offer it to someone in the park.’
So, to understand this story you have to know what my son-in-law looks like! [image on screen] So this is my son-in-law Myles: he’s a rapper, and he’s a nice guy! He’s a great guy! I’m very blessed with him as a son-in-law. If you’re listening to this, Myles, we love you! So, but Myles decided he was going to try and give this café latte to someone in the park. But when they saw him approaching, they all backed away! And no one wanted to take it. And the more people backed away, the more it looked suspicious because people could see that everyone was backing away, and I think they thought— We were all standing there roaring with laughter – I think they thought it was some programme; that we were filming him.
So he just could not give it away. Eventually, he walked alongside someone for 400 yards, chatting to them, making friends with them, and eventually persuaded them to take it – by which time it was cold! But the point is, nobody wanted a free gift.
And we’re so suspicious. And we think, you know, ‘God is offering this free gift. There must be a catch.’ There isn’t a catch. It is free. But it’s not cheap.
It cost Jesus his life. He died for you, he died for me, so that we could be forgiven and receive this gift of eternal life, this gift of a relationship with him. And we receive it through repentance and faith. ‘Repentance’ sounds a really heavy word, but all it means is turning away from the bad stuff in our life, changing our mind about that stuff and saying: ‘Actually, that doesn’t do us any good anyway.’ God loves us. He never asks us to give up things that are good for us. He just says, ‘Get rid of that junk. Turn away from it.’
And sometimes people talk about ‘the cost of being a Christian’, the cost of being a Christian is nothing compared to the cost of not being a Christian. The cost of being a Christian is nothing compared to what it cost Jesus to make it possible for us to have this relationship with God. That’s repentance.
And then faith. Faith is just trust. That’s what it means. Everyone exercises faith. You’re exercising faith by sitting on these chairs – you’re trusting that the chair will hold you up. All the way through life we exercise faith.
When I was an atheist, I was exercising faith in the fact that I believed there was no God. That was an act of faith: you can’t prove it, but I based my life on it as an act of faith. Now I base my life on faith in what Jesus did on the cross for me, and on him. I put my trust in him.
That’s the second leg of the tripod: the work of Jesus.
And the third leg of the tripod is the witness of the Holy Spirit: it’s him and not us.
If you asked me how I know I’m married, I can point to the marriage certificate, to an event that took place here, but I can also point to thirty-six years of marriage now and the experience of that. And if you asked me how I know I’m a Christian, I can point to the word of God, I can point to the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but I can also point now to decades of experience of a relationship with him.
And in that verse we looked at, Revelation 3:20, where Jesus is knocking at the door of our lives, he says: ‘If anyone opens the door, I will come in’. He comes in by his Spirit. It’s the Spirit of Jesus who comes to live within you. And Jesus says about the Holy Spirit is like the wind. You can’t see the wind. Has anyone ever seen the wind? No. Do you believe that the wind exists? Yes, of course. Why? Because you can see its impact. You can see what happens to the leaves. You can see the power of the wind. And it’s the same with the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes people say, ‘I don’t think I’m a Christian. I haven’t had any sort of really dramatic experience.’ They’re expecting that they’ve got to see something: Jesus has got to appear in their bedroom and say, ‘Helloooo, I’m here!’ But it’s not like that. You can’t see the Holy Spirit, but you can see its impact. And you can see the impact, for example, on your own life, on the lives of other people. Maybe there’s someone here today and you say, ‘The reason I’m here is I saw the impact on a friend’s life or a member of my family.’ You were observing the ‘wind’, the work of the Holy Spirit.
Maybe even on your own life, you’re beginning to see a change. Maybe something’s happened to you even in the last two or three weeks. One or two of you may say this has happened: things are beginning to change.
How do we change?
These are the kinds of ways the Spirit changes us. Being a Christian doesn’t make you better than anybody else, but hopefully, it makes you better than you were before.
