I had the curious experience last week of a title for a sermon that confused people! For the evening service I gave my sermon the title "Just relax! It's fine!" I did it deliberately. I wanted to find something that summed up Amos 6, but that also made people think! It was quoted back to me before the morning service as apiece of advice when I was feeling nervous, being taken at face value. Someone else came along wondering what it was all about, intrigued by the title.
"Just relax. It's fine!" On the face of it, this is an expression of peace and confidence. "Everything will turn out well; God is in His heaven and all's well with the world. Don't worry!" How good it is to have that kind of confidence in God, to be able to trust Him implicitly with every aspect of life and faith, to trust Him to be at work in His Church and for Him to have His people in His hands for our safety and well-being. I know lots of people for whom that kind of confidence is a pipe-dream, but were they to find it, what peace it would bring to their lives!
In fact, that's not what Amos 6 is about; so that's not what the sermon was about. Amos 6 is all about complacency; it is about a people who were relaxed and living a life of luxury for themselves while the poor are being down-trodden; their worship is a cause of sin; their attitudes are full of injustice; God has sent His prophet to call them to repentance and they are ignoring him, because everything is fine! Just relax; there's no need to repent! That's quite a different attitude. This is no longer a trusting confidence in God, but a blind ignoring of God and His Word.
How fine is the line between these two very different attitudes. There is not a million miles between these two contrasting views of life and faith; yet in reality they are poles apart.
When I came to Juniper Green some nine years ago, lots of people told me how great this congregation is. Despite all the history of conflict, there were people who recognised that the congregation had achieved a lot and had an enormous amount going for it. Last week , at the Kirk Session meeting, the elders heard from a number of groups doing children's work and other kids of service and they were all saying the same thing - we need more people to help with our work, new people who are willing to take on new responsibilities. There is a fine line between celebrating good things with glad confidence and then finding ourselves in a pickle of bother.
As a church, we can't sit back and bask in past glories; we have to keep pressing on for the future, so that the light of Christ continues to burn. I met someone at a wedding recently who is an elder in a Church in the city whose minister has just retired. She felt this was the death knell for their church because they would never find another minister in the current climate. She's not altogether right, but for the first time, she and her fellow-elders in a big, prosperous, comfortable Church had been shaken out of, perhaps, a sense of complacency.
"One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13,14)
Apply that to your life; apply that to your Church.
