What is this new Life in Christ?

The Bible says we are to welcome those who are not yet strong in the faith, and as a mature believer I would welcome you if you are starting out as a Jesus-follower. New believers require help in reorienting their lives, both to understand what it’s all about, and to discover the steps towards spiritual growth. 

A new believer, returning into her habitual milieu, was asked after a while, “What’s happened to you?” She didn’t need to say she had turned to Jesus, but it became evident to her friends by a certain joy and peace that now characterised her life. But how would she – or you – answer that question: what’s happened to you? 

Well, the first thing that I trust has happened to you is that You have heard the good news of Jesus.

Whether you heard it on the internet, in a local meeting, or read it in a book, you have come to understand that “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1.15). This is the essence of the Good News (which is what the word “Gospel” means). It is good news because we are all to some extent sinners and therefore we all need to be “saved”.

When Jesus’ mother Mary was still a virgin, Jesus’ arrival by a miraculous birth was announced to Mary by an angel. Joseph, Mary’s fiancé, was stunned and confused by the news, until he too had an angelic visitation.  An angel appeared to him in a dream, explaining that it was God’s miraculous work that had made Mary pregnant: “she will give birth to a son,” said the angel of God, “and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1.20-21).

Jesus came, therefore, to save people from their sins. When you heard this message, you began to understand  that in God’s sight you were in the category of “sinner”. Probably this was quite a humbling experience – no-one likes to be called a sinner; but the Bible is clear: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). None of us is perfect as we should be; we all have a bad conscience and know we have done wrong. 

Not only that, but you were made to realise that you were in a serious predicament before a holy and just God. You needed his forgiveness. Then you heard the Good News, the essence of what the apostles preached: “Christ died for our sins… and was raised from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:1-4). Though our sins deserved God’s just punishment, Jesus stood in for us and bore that penalty by dying “for our sins” on the cross. This is the message that Jesus wants diffused throughout the world: “preach the Good News to all creation”, he said, adding, “Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved” (Mark 16.15-16).

As you heard this message, you were encouraged to turn to the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. You opened your heart to him in prayer and faith, calling on him to save you. You put your trust in Jesus and he welcomed you as one of his followers, his “disciples”; this essentially means a learner, an apprentice in the art of good living. Your new life had begun, developing into a process of spiritual growth.

At Jesus’ school there is a lot to learn: spiritual growth, like physical growth, takes time; the important thing for you today is to say to yourself, the process has begun.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Blog new orientation

Up until now on authentichopeforanswers.com I have sought to enlighten those in the darkness of secular materialistic thinking, to save them from their incipient hopelessness by pointing to the only True Source of valid, true, fulfilling answers – the One and only true living God, revealed in Jesus Christ. I thank those who have been following me and I hope you have found my writing helpful.

I have become aware of what seems to be a cultural movement away from empty atheistic answers; thinkers these days want something more serious and solid on which they can build their lives. I hope my posts add a small contribution to this fresh hunger for Truth to satisfy the heart as well as the mind. 

Glen Scrivener comments on this new openness to the Christian worldview, that people are more open to wanting to check out the Bible, find out more about Jesus, and some have started attending church. A friend locally has typified that movement from discontent with superficial answers to grasping the life-giving truth of the biblical Story, and it makes me think and hope that out there in the blog-reading world there may be others who, having found the Christian answer more satisfying, desire to become followers of Jesus.

I want for some time to come to reorient this blog therefore, so as to help such new believers who may or may not have much background knowledge of biblical things. Having turned to pray to Jesus for light and salvation, these believers have set out on a new path; but for many it is unknown territory. There is a lot to learn as a new believer, and it takes time to assimilate all the blessing we receive through faith in Christ and what exactly is the life that Jesus calls us to when we trust in him.

As I give thought to the forthcoming posts, I envisage maintaining the orientation of giving authentic answers, but no longer so much addressing those still in the mists of vain relativistic ideas and scientific materialism; rather I will seek to deal with the questions of those who set out on the new path of faith in Jesus. I will seek to answer the key question a new believer might ask: “What exactly is the new life in Christ?” I will share advice that helped me as a young believer, and some essential truths revealed in the Bible that will help the Jesus-follower to grow both in faith and in living as a child of God. 

To live in harmonious relationship with God, as I have often mentioned in previous blogs, is the real purpose of our existence. To find this is to enter into the fulfilling life that God envisaged for us in his love when he created us. While the mass of humankind drifts far away from such a relationship, those who hear Jesus’ call, “Follow me” and respond with repentance and trust in the Saviour, start out on a life where at last they begin to find and fulfil the meaning and purpose of our lives.

St Augustine said it well long ago in a prayer in his “Confessions”: “Lord, You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You”. Jesus invites everyone to come to him and learn of him, promising that rest of soul (Matthew 11.28-30). Through his saving work, and through faith in him, believers experience that rest of soul; they will enjoy it and develop it as they learn to walk with Jesus day by day.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Everything hinges on

Everything hinges on one key decision.

As you struggle with the profound existential issues that overwhelm the sensitive soul; as you think through what could be the real purpose of your life; as you wonder if there’s a God who could possibly help you; as you resist the temptation to put an end to it all – there is one key decision that confronts you.

You don’t have to go on a long pilgrimage; you don’t have to follow a three-year university course; you don’t have to master some obscure concepts, and you don’t have to pass some test of endurance. 

You have to be humble, open to be taught that the life-philosophy you hold dear may well be wrong. You have to realise that no atheistic worldview can offer you the serious answers you seek. You have to consider not “religion”, but rather God himself, because whether you realise it yet or not, God has demonstrated his existence in coming by a historic incarnation into this world: Jesus Christ is the proof that God exists, and if you do not know that yet, a thoughtful reading of the four Gospels recounting his life, his teaching, his divine claims, his miraculous ministry, his atoning death, and his triumphant resurrection will lead you to conclude that God has indeed sent his divine Son into the world to give us the answers we seek.  Jesus said he “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19.10); human beings without Christ are lost. He is the key we need to be “saved”.

Jesus is able to save you from your ignorance, for he is “the light of the world” (John 8.12). He is able to reveal to you how much God loves you, for “God so loved the world (including you) that he gave his only Son (Jesus) that whoever (including you) believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). He is able to enter your life by his life-giving Spirit, as if you were born again into a completely wonderful life in relationship with the God who loves you; he is knocking at the door of your heart, eager to come in and forgive all your failures and sins, and renew you in a life that has real meaning and purpose.

Millions the world over have experienced this new life that Jesus gives; it is what corresponds to the deepest needs of our soul. Until we experience this, we are lost, confused and guilty, wandering hopelessly to no apparent purpose. Jesus can heal your inner being; he can save your soul; he can give you new life.

It all hinges on one thing. Surprisingly, one decision, clearly and resolutely taken, can lift you out of the darkness of despair and bring you to the joy of a real, harmonious relationship with God. One decision involving willingness to be made anew. One decision that you will hold to in the days to come. It all hinges on you calling upon the name of Jesus, opening your heart and saying, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, the sinner; cleanse me from my sins; make me born again; come into my heart and be my Lord and Saviour; I will follow you with all my heart”.

This prayer of faith and commitment is the key to experiencing God’s loving presence, and proving to yourself that He is real, for he is eager to answer that prayer when it is sincerely prayed. Your wavering and doubting will be over; a relationship with God will begin.

Clive Every-Clayton

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How does God communicate?

The Bible belittles dumb idols made by the hands of men: “they have mouths, but they cannot speak” (Psalm 115.4-7). Normally God should have powers superior to humans’, no? 

Yes – surely if there is a Creator God who has made people capable of speaking, communicating their thoughts in words – shouldn’t God be able to do the same or even better? It is therefore legitimate to ask, has God spoken, and if so, how? And what he says must also be very important.

I once read that expressions such as, “The Lord said…”, “The word of the Lord came…”, “Thus says the Lord…”, “Hear the word of the Lord…”, “the Lord declares…” etc. come about 2,000 times in the Old Testament. As I subsequently read through the Bible, I checked that out, and indeed, including expressions like, “the commandment of the Lord”, I counted about 2,000. Either those were two thousand blasphemous lies, or God is indeed in the business of communicating his word to human beings.

Indeed, right from Genesis chapter 1, the creation of man and woman, God speaks to them. He continues to speak to their children, to Noah, to Abraham and so on for centuries. How exactly in those first years he “spoke” to humans is not made explicit, but that he communicated his will, his plans, his promises, and his orders to those early patriarchs is reasserted very often in the Bible. He even interacted with them as they answered him, and gave them his instructions.

Later on, he called Moses and spoke with him as it were “face to face” (Exodus 33.11). The Ten Commandments were verbally given by God: the list in Exodus 20 begins, “And God spoke all these words, saying…” 

Through this communication of God’s words, the Lord reveals himself. There has been revelation from God, in words we can understand. This brings us the light and truth that we humans, darkened in our thinking, desperately need. We do well to check it out, to meditate on God’s word, and to place our confidence in what our Creator says.

Later on, God spoke to prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, telling them to pass on his words to the people. He says some powerful truths: “I made the earth and created man upon it”; “I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no God”; “I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45, verses 12, 5, 19). So God reveals himself in words that are true: here we have access to divine truth. This is of no small importance!

When Jesus came, he also spoke from God. “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets”, says the New Testament, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1.1-2). “What I say,” Jesus declares, “I say as the Father has told me” (John 12.50). He tells his hearers he is “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (John 8.40). He adds a question pertinent even still in our day: “If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?” (John 8.46).

Do you want to hear God speaking to you? The place to look is in the Bible. If we never read it, we are closing our eyes and ears to vital truth that God has revealed for our good. God has seen fit to reveal truth and answers that we need to know, that our own thinking and bright philosophy could never discover by ourselves. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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On “having sex”

At a seminar I attended a few years back, Peter J Williams, Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, gave an enlightening comment on the expression “having sex”. He said the expression was not used before the late 1950’s. When you think about the way these words are formulated, you can compare them with similar expressions such as, “having a great holiday”, of “having a good breakfast”; on the negative side you could talk about “having a bad night out”, or having a headache. Think about that way of formulating those words: the word “having” – whether something enjoyable or distressing – underlines essentially the self-centredness of one’s assessment.

Now when it comes to sexual union, selfishness should, ideally, have no place; in former times it was modestly referred to as “the act of love”. To speak self-centredly of “having sex” is a very degrading way of referring to the highest and purest experience of love between a man and his wife at the most intimate level. It debases that which is to be highly honoured into the satisfying of a rather base appetite.

I believe God made humans as sexual beings. It’s right there on page 1 of the Bible. But why, you may ask, did God give us humans such a powerful sexual appetite? Why did he link sex with such deep pleasure? Was he not putting a potent temptation in the human heart?

When you refer to page 1 of Genesis, you read God’s strong encouragement to the man and the woman he had made, to “have sex”. He didn’t use those words, of course; he said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Genesis 1.28). In other words, have children! (That would evidently involve sexual union). We may conclude that God gave humans the pleasurable sexual instinct so that they may be motivated to have families. God’s plan for maximum sexual happiness is spelt out in those first three chapters of Genesis. God instituted marriage by creating Eve when Adam was all alone; God brought her to him, expounding his first principle of marriage: “the man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall be one flesh” (i.e. be united sexually).

When Jesus was teaching on this theme, he added “they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19.6). This is why adultery is condemned in the Ten Commandments and throughout the Bible. “Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral” (Hebrews 13.4). 

This is the Master plan for “good sex” – sex without guilt. Those who are conscious of having sinned in the area of sex often suffer the psychological pain of deep, repressed guilt: however, they can know that God is able both to forgive and wipe away all the transgressions of the past, sexual as well as others. God can renew the heart and mind of repentant believers in Christ so that as they commit to honour God’s guidelines, they can overcome temptation in this area.

Those who follow biblical wisdom experience the very best way to fulfilment in the area of sex. The Christian perspective also shows the way to deeper, more spiritual pleasures: to do the will of God in all areas of our lives, not just the sexual, is the way to true human fulfilment. The profound spiritual joy of maintaining a cleansed well-taught conscience is priceless! By the grace of God, I can testify to this myself.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Am I a good person?

What is a good person? How to define what goodness is for a human being? In his ground-breaking, thoroughly reasoned, brilliantly insightful book “After Virtue”, Alasdair MacIntyre clarifies the question with luminous simplicity. Taking as examples how we would assess whether a watch is a good watch or a farmer is a good farmer, he says “we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are typically expected to serve.” A knife or a pen is similarly “good” if they fit the purpose for which they were conceived.

Reflecting on this, I realised that Jesus had taught this principle when he referred to salt. “Salt is good” is one of his words, (Luke 14.34). Its purpose is clearly to provide flavour to food. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, he adds, “but if salt has lost its taste… it is no longer good”; it can’t fulfil its purpose (Matthew 5.13).

Why is our generation so confused about goodness and morality? Why do ethical debates, instead of helpfully defining goodness, end rather in a good mess? Alasdair MacIntyre puts his finger on the deep reason: what’s missing is an understanding of man’s purpose (telos is the word he uses). If a thing is considered good because it fulfils its objective or purpose, the key question is what is the purpose of human beings? If there is no clear answer to that question, it is impossible to judge whether a person is good.

Now if everything in the universe, including our human species, resulted from a powerful explosion without any guiding intelligence and wisdom to provide the purpose of it all, there can be nothing but confusion both as to our meaning and purpose. And lacking understanding of our purpose, there is no means of assessing the goodness or badness of people.

So the secular West’s evacuating the Biblical wisdom of the divine Creator who had in mind a purpose for his creation, and specifically for human beings made “in his image”, is the real cause of our profound confusion. If we do not know what a person if “for”, we cannot say whether or not he is good in accomplishing that purpose. 

So both the meaning and purpose of our human existence, and the criteria of good and bad, depend on knowing why we exist – what is our telos. Back in the 17th century, some serious biblical scholars, reflecting on the essence of Christian truth, posed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism the question, “What is the chief end (telos) of man?” They furnished Christianity with the most brilliant summary answer, unsurpassed in four centuries: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”. Vital wisdom in 14 words!

The same essential answer was expressed by Stephen Meyer, erudite scientist, biblical Christian, and author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. Interviewed by Piers Morgan and asked point blank: “What is the meaning of life?” he responded wonderfully: “To come into a relationship with the Creator”. If that is the purpose of our existence, and we are not in harmonious relationship with God, we are not truly “good”, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. Today the Creator calls us out of that problematic situation: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened”, says Jesus, “and I will give you rest… learn from me” (Matthew 11.28). We will find that rest, through Jesus, as we commit to fulfilling His purpose for our lives.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Man’s search for God

Deep in the heart of every human being there is a realisation of God. Helen Keller was a small child, about two years of age, when she became totally blind and deaf. She had a meagre existence, cut off from the outside world, unable either to see or to hear, and her baby vocabulary was inadequate to make her thoughts and her wants known. She endured her existence for a few years, until finally a nurse was engaged who found the way to get through to Helen. It is an amazing true story, but Helen grew up able to talk and live a relatively normal life. At one point in her youth and education she was told about God. This is how she responded: “I always knew there must be a God, but I did not know his name”.

Human attitudes towards that deep-seated notion of God vary between two alternatives. On the one hand, people find it somewhat reassuring to feel that there is a kind-hearted power watching over their daily trials and tribulation, giving hope for a positive turn-out to things. Just to believe that God understands and cares relieves the soul of many worries. On the other hand, there are those who profoundly dislike the idea that a divine power may be watching them constantly, noting their secret sins, hidden from others but not from God.

The first of these two groups of people prefer to think of God as loving and kind; the second have the impression that he is righteous and angry. This second group therefore shun the God they don’t want to believe in, and try in various ways to shut the idea of him out of their minds. They may harden their hearts and plunge into all kinds of evil, dulling the voice of conscience, hoping that this harsh God does not exist. Others remain decent citizens, but calmly side-line God in their thinking; they profess to be atheists or agnostics, so that the perturbing idea of God does not bother them.

Those who recognise within them the hunger for some transcendent reassurance hope that the God who is fairly vague in their imagination does look down in kindness upon them. For them to seek after that God with eagerness of heart, however, is another matter. Some attend worship, without really knowing too much about their God. Others keep him in the background of their minds, in case they ever need some divine help. Some seek God, but fail to find him; he seems distant, absent so they don’t bother too much about practicing any religion.

There is a balance that needs to be found here. If God is not kind and good, he is not worth believing in; if he is not righteous in his holy requirements of us, he has no moral fibre – which means he is not good. When Jesus was teaching about his Father, he revealed BOTH the awesomeness of God’s righteous demands and his eternal just judgment, AND the extraordinary kindness and grace by which he grants mercy, forgiveness, and acceptance to those who turn sincerely to him in trust and repentance.

So both our inner intuitions about God possess some truth. How they cohere in balance is brilliantly seen in the Cross of Christ. He died “for us”: we are, as sinners, under God’s wrath and judgment; but in amazing love the Father sent his beloved Son to suffer the just penalty on our behalf. On that basis God grants mercy and forgiveness justly when we repent and trust our Saviour.

Clive Every-Clayton

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How to pray

There are times in everyone’s life when the reflex is to turn to prayer. It may be on hearing bad news, on discovering a cancerous tumour, on losing a dear one, or also on finally being chosen for a job, meeting up with a true friend, or being told that the cancer is in remission: either way, in both the bad times and the good, we let out a “Thank God” or an “Oh my God!” to one whose presence does not normally concern us very much.

At times, when facing the tough existential questions about what life is all about and whether our existence has any meaning, our thoughts may turn to God: is he there? Does he know me? Can he help me? In our more hopeful moments, we may consider praying.

But how should we pray? Some people travel far on pilgrimage to be in a place where they think their prayer will be heard. Jesus disagrees with that: “when you pray”, he taught, “go into your room and shut the door”. Pray to God in secret, he said, for he will see in secret and respond to your prayer (Matthew 6.5-6). This means that our secret prayers are heard by God, when no-one else could possibly hear them. Prayer arises from our hearts and we can formulate words to God without even having to express them out loud.

But what should we say? Jesus goes on to give “the Lord’s Prayer”, the “Our Father”. This is the type of prayer that Jesus encourages his followers to pray. It covers worship (“Hallowed be thy name”), entering God’s purposes (“Thy kingdom come”) and yielding our lives to obey his will, (“Thy will be done”). Then come our requests: for our “daily bread” – the necessities of life; for the forgiveness of our sins – that is, our spiritual need to renew our life in harmony with God; and for help to live a truly good life – overcoming temptation and being delivered from evil.

While many repeat this prayer without too much thought, it can be personalised and developed into a meaningful time with God, day by day.

However, the first and most important prayer that everyone should be encouraged to pray is taught by Jesus in one of his parables, where the humble worshipper approaches God almost too afraid to open his mouth, and pleads, “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18.13). That kind of prayer God gladly answers, says Jesus. It takes humility, for our pride does not easily acknowledge we are sinners before a holy God. But this first real prayer for forgiveness brings us into relationship with our kind heavenly Father, because without this, the Bible warns, “your sins have hidden God’s face from you, so that he does not hear” (Isaiah 59.2). So our first prayer must be for forgiveness.

Another way of saying the same thing can be found in Romans 10.13: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved”. This prayer is a call on the Lord Jesus for God’s forgiveness and salvation. This is a prayer that God promises to answer – the praying person “will be saved”. One desperate man cried out in prayer: “God, if you exist, save my soul if I have one”. God, who is kind and merciful, seeing the sincerity of this man’s repentance and faith, answered by transforming his life!

Have you prayed that very first prayer? You could pray right now, where you are, and a new life with God will begin. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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Morality – the puzzle

People raise complaints against the “old morality” (where, for example, homosexual acts were considered a sexual perversion, abortion was a crime associated with murder, and kids born out of wedlock were “illegitimate children”).

They consider that what is wrong with this old morality is that it is “out of date”, as is indicated by their use of the expression “on the wrong side of history”, to depict those who still hold to them.

Does morality then change with the times? Does morality differ according to when and where you live? The moral relativist would say so – there is no objective morality that we can turn to with confidence. After all, who is to say what the right morality is? Will it be different tomorrow? It could well be. 

This reflection is not miles away from our daily lives, because we all make judgments about good and evil. These judgments differ from person to person, and from age to age: so there seems to be no objective standard to guide us as we face issues requiring some kind of moral judgment.

C.S. Lewis refers to this as “the poison of subjectivism”. “Until modern times,” he writes, no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments, or that what they discovered was objective”. What Lewis saw coming is the slough in which we are plunged today: the old morality is condemned by those who seem to have invented a new morality, with new sins like “homophobia” and “intolerance”.

It is well worth listening to the deep wisdom of this Oxford don and ethics specialist. C.S. Lewis insists it is a “fatal superstition that men can create values.” There needs to be “some objective standard of good”, he asserts, for any moral judgments to have meaning. He shows how it is impossible to condemn the moral values of others as evil without using an objective overarching standard. Otherwise such condemnation merely expresses the subjective opinion of one or more people. “Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring” (Christian Reflections, p99-100).

The person who wants to relax the old-time morality and impose something “better”, does so only because he judges the old values by a standard: but the standard he uses is mere variable personal preference. Thus subjectivism poisons all such judgments and undermines the very heart of morality.

Consider this further deep wisdom from Professor Lewis: “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky. Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium” (the one supreme moral trump-card).

He recognises that our ideas of the good may change. However, “they cannot change either for the better or for the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can recede”. 

The necessary requirement for all and any morality is such an absolute and immutable good as that which resides only in the eternal God, who is “holy, holy, holy, the Lord God almighty”. He alone is, and always has been, (despite being neglected) the objective source of moral truth. And he has communicated to us, his moral creatures, in words we can understand, how he defines good, and what human acts he condemns as evil. “To sin is to transgress God’s law” (1 John 3.4). Wisdom and moral righteousness consist in obeying it.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Away with religion?

The New Atheists were dedicated to eradicate religion from any place of influence in society. In this they were following in the footsteps of Karl Marx. Marx’s position is bluntly summed up by Professor Carl Truman, in these terms: “if religion is one major means by which the current unjust set of economic relations is maintained, then at the heart of any drive to transform society must lie a pungent and effective criticism of religion”.

It seems to me useful to discern here a principle that deserves to be exposed. Modern-day atheists, thinking that religion is the root of a lot of evil, attack it tooth and nail. “Religion”, of course, is an easy target to hit, for the word englobes all kinds of, quite honestly, ridiculous world-views with some kind of divinity attached (there are approximately 4,000 religions in the world). So under the heading of “religion”, one can find plenty to validly criticise.

I just want to make two points. The first is to consider where Karl Marx’s anti-religion stance ended up: huge persecution against millions of good-living people who, after suffering immense horrors, saw the collapse and failure of the whole atheistic Soviet enterprise. It is worth considering therefore, whether the modern atheistic attack on “religion” may also harm a large number of essentially decent folk, and also bring about a kind of godless society which, instead of raising the total sum of human happiness, actually brings society down to bizarre and awful horrors. Indeed, are we not already witnesses to the effective decline brought on by the insistence on godless “freedom” where selfishness replaces Jesus’ ennobling call to “deny yourself”, where immorality brings about so many broken homes and broken lives, where children suffer most of all, and antagonism and hatred of others replaces the basic principle essential for a harmonious and positive society – “love your neighbour as yourself”? The godless and religion-less influence we see undermining our erstwhile peaceful and relatively happy society should give us pause for thought.

The second point I want to make was well made by Blaise Pascal three centuries ago when he noted: “I see a number of religions in conflict, and therefore all false, except one” (§198/693). I find that “pensée” very clever. Whereas atheists would say, as they find all kind of religions in conflict, that they throw them all out, Pascal has the genius to see that that does not follow logically: one may – indeed could well be – the true one coming from the one true God. “Religions want to be believed on their own authority”, Pascal adds, and they make threats against those who refuse to believe: “I do not believe them on that account”, he wisely says. “But I see Christianity, and find its prophecies” (numerous fulfilments of biblical prophecies he catalogues in several pages of his Pensées); he concludes, “no other religion can do that!”

Society needs a Transcendent Authority to maintain peace, order, and stability; that authority may come from “religion”. But not just any religion will do. We need a “decent religion” such as even Richard Dawkins recognises Christianity to be. We need the one true religion, the religion that comes from our Creator God, a God who is objectively there and who speaks both wisdom, truth, and goodness into the world he created; not “the god of philosophers and scholars” – as Pascal put it in his Memorial; rather, “the God of Jesus Christ” who transformed the thinker’s life as he submitted to his lordship. That’s what we need, both individually and as a guide to society.

Clive Every-Clayton

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