Streams of Living Water

Read: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Last week, I saw a billboard poster for a prominent British insurance firm recently with the message, “There is only one predictable thing in life – the future is unpredictable.” Now there’s a sense in which I understand what the insurer is saying, but there’s another sense in which that’s just plain not true – that’s just a gimmick to get you to buy their insurance products – that should be prosecuted under trading standards legislation, because you see the problem is that ultimately, the future is 100% predictable. We know the future for 100% of us here today, like as not, will be death and the grave. Every one of us will die – from the oldest to the youngest, from the fittest to the laziest, from the poorest to the richest – we all know the future – and it ain’t orange – the future is dead. We don’t know is when, where or how it will happen, but we know it will. How dark the future is! Read the rest of this entry »

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

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! Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read: John 14:1-14
One of my favourite sayings is ‘the best of men are men at best’. It is true that those we idolise, those in positions of power and respect whether in sport, government or the church, whilst they may be great men and women, are all too fallible. Ben, contestant in TV’s X-Factor admitted this week his addiction to cocaine. John Prescott was exposed as an adulterer. The best of men are men at best – even in us, we know that there are flaws, things we do well to hide, but if they came out into the open it would cause a scandal. Over and above the best of men stands one who is unique – one whose words combined so perfectly with his works that He was a one-of-a-kind – the best of all men but without the flaws which mark us off as human beings. Someone whose dignity, nobility and glory; someone whose love, compassion and mercy were so pure as to make Him the centre-piece of all human history – someone whose personality and character has so enraptured millions of people as to draw them to Him in a way we aren’t to anyone else. Of course, I speak of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is He, and His life, which constitutes the third reason why I am a Christian today. Read the rest of this entry »