TIPlatypus
New member
Sadly, Desert Reign passed away in August after a long battle with cancer. He will be missed greatly. He loved God and the truth and was always willing to defend his faith.
Here is his funeral speech (from his big picture thread):
Here is his funeral speech (from his big picture thread):
Hello everyone, thanks for coming. Sorry I couldn’t be here personally to welcome you, but I was unavoidably prevented.
I hope you enjoyed my choice of a few songs. Spirit in the Sky wasn’t written by a Christian, but God uses lots of things for his purposes regardless of the motive of the individual. And you’ve got, When I survey the wondrous Cross, to come at the end.
I want to say a few things briefly to you about what is important to me. I have written many things and this is not the place to go into any detail. So if anyone is interested in pursuing my theology further, ask Neil, and he can point you in the right direction.
The first thing I want to say is only what I have said before here at Kingsland. The Gospel begins and ends with faith. That faith has been made possible because of Christ. He is God’s gift to us. That’s what Paul says. You can have all the right doctrines and do all the right things, but without faith, it is impossible to please God. Faith is not about what you believe. Neither is it about a state of mind that you can get yourself into with a bit of practice like some sales technique or meditation system. Neither is faith anything to do with practising religious rituals, like going to church on Sunday or making the sign of the cross or raising your arms when you worship or kneeling down or getting baptised.
Faith is nothing other than trust in God. If you trust God, then everything else follows. If you trust him, then you will do what he commands regardless of the cost. If you trust in God then you will act accordingly. It is perhaps unfortunate that this simple concept of trust has been hidden by translating the Greek word for trust with faith. It is really trust. The word ‘faith’ has more the sense of a set of beliefs. That is not the main idea behind the Greek word that Paul uses. That is what Paul says: trust is the beginning and end of the Gospel. This applies whoever you are and wherever you come from. It is a great leveller. The university professor is not more qualified to have faith than the waitress in the local hamburger restaurant. The Jew is not more qualified than the gentile. All must have this faith, this trust, in order to please God.
If you ask God for something and you trust him that he has granted your request, then it will happen. But not everything can be asked of God in this way. If there were a rule that when we ask God for something, we get it, then we would be trusting in a rule, not in a person. We have no right to make demands. True trust doesn’t do this. And the fact is, that suffering in our lives is necessary, to prove who we are. If we always had only success in our lives, then success would not be success. It is only success when we know that failure was also possible. It is only suffering because we know that the suffering need not have happened. So our sufferings and our joys prove that we are real people. The more we experience of both, the deeper we become as human beings. That is why we should really be thinking of embracing our sufferings rather than seeking to avoid them.
When I say embrace, I don’t mean that we should look for suffering. That would not make sense at all. This is only normal for human beings. But in accepting our sufferings and going through them with courage and generosity, we can give God the glory. Anyone can be happy in success but it is in these difficult things that we can shake our fists and say, we are more than conquerors. One of my aims in life has been to prove that when God made me, he didn’t make a mistake, that heaven and earth can look at me and say, this was what creation was for. That in this world, the greatest beauty can arise. I say that now with confidence. It was all worthwhile. He did a great job making me. Thank-you!
So we shouldn’t really all the time be asking God to relieve us of our sufferings and to grant us success in this life. The things we trust God for are of greater value than our own self-centred concerns. Trust in God is not trust for anything. God is who he is, and if we trust him, it is because we trust who he is as the person he is, namely the righteous God, the God who defines love, the God who adopts orphans, the God who protects the oppressed. And of course, the God who sent Jesus, his own son, to die on a cross for us to prove that he also is real, that he also is willing to suffer the consequences of the life he created for us. That is why we can trust him at all.
I have had a fair share of those sufferings. From the cradle to the grave. And my third bout of cancer has got me in the end. But I have known God’s love in a measure more than equal to those sufferings. Especially in granting me a beautiful wife and four lovely children. It is also important to me that in spite of those sufferings, I have always thought of the world as something very good. I have always appreciated the richness of the world, both in nature and in other people. It is why I have spent a good deal of my time at the keyboard opposing those who suggest otherwise. And they come in all sorts of guises. Some mathematicians or philosophers for example might develop views that all their theories work perfectly and have a simple beauty about them but that the real world, in other words the physical world, never seems to quite live up to such perfection. They can then get the idea that there is something wrong with the world. The real world seems to them more like a salad sandwich. There is always a piece of lettuce that falls out or, if you try to poke it back in, out falls a prawn or an onion. My friends, let me tell you that the reason the world can’t be fitted into a set of beautiful equations is because it is alive. And things that are alive defy the rules that you try to impose on them. And the more you try, the harder the world defies you. That’s what life is. It is something that does its own thing. And you can’t predict it. And it forces you to respect it.
My concern is of course not with mathematicians and philosophers, who after all, are only doing what they do best and enjoy best. I only gave that as an example. It is those who claim to be Christian, who I have the most concern with. The Bible is clear: it says that God looked on all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. There are a great many Christians who oppose this simple statement. And they want to tell us that the world is bad, and indeed that we ourselves are bad. They have capitulated to their sufferings and sin and see only bad in them; instead of trusting in God through them and arriving at beauty, they trust in themselves and arrive at ugliness. Ugliness and destruction are always cheaper than beauty and creativity. They invent all sorts of complicated arguments and they throw hundreds of verses of scripture at you to prove this, in the hope that you will give up in the face of such complexity and just accept their conclusions. However, when you actually examine each of the scriptures they use, you will find that none of them whatsoever supports their point of view.
They also excuse themselves by saying that the world is fallen. That there was a fall. They blame it on a historical event. But what they are really trying to do is to get you to believe that what God thought about his own creation was wrong. They want you to think that it is not, very good, at all. They want you to think that the world is useless, imperfect and that we as human beings are also useless, valueless, and inept.
Why do they want you to believe this? I have asked myself this often. It is perhaps a combination of things. Their lack of faith in God makes them think that God has to be everything in order to be God. They can’t accept that man can be something as well as God being something. They can’t accept that man can create things as well as God creating things. In short, they can’t accept that we can be truly alive as well as God being truly alive. In their thinking there is no room for poor man. We can only be what we are if God determines it first. We can only be saved if God determines it first. And so on. This just arises from a lack of faith on their part in the love of God. For them, nothing we do has any value in itself. There are of course other reasons, but this is not the place to go into any details.
I want to be clear about this. Unless we believe that what we are doing has value in itself then we will never be happy. We will never be satisfied with our life. Unless we believe that we have intrinsic worth then how can we undertake such basic things as forming friendships, getting a job or raising a family? We find our greatest value in knowing that we are loved by God in Christ. For who we are. Remember that God loved us while we were still sinners. It was he who said, ‘I have come that they might have life and have life to the full’. This should not surprise us, since God is the author of life, and it is in coming to him that we find it. But the idea that everything we do, including all our choices, has already been mapped out for us, is not life. Life cannot be mapped out. That is what life is.
If you succumb to their teachings, you will only see yourself as a miserable, wretched, pathetic excuse for a being. I’m not exaggerating. This is what they themselves say. And when you pray, it won’t be so as to change God’s mind about something, because you are supposed to be inept and cannot have any influence on God at all. Your so-called prayers will only be for your own benefit. To make you yourselves feel better. And you will live in hope and hope alone that one day you will be saved and go to be with God. You will not have actual assurance from these teachings at any time, because assurance is not available for the inept and fallen. You will forever be wondering whether some intended action is right or wrong because the rules of conduct seem to conflict with each other, and the times when you had a vibrant relationship with God through the spirit, where you knew instinctively what was wrong and what was right without having to look up some external rule-book, are long gone by. And you will feel constantly indebted to the lords and teachers over you and all your prayers, like theirs, will be timid, beginning with ‘If it is your will Lord…’, instead of the bold prayers that the Christians of old prayed, ‘Give your servants power to preach the message of the kingdom…’ Every moment is a new moment. Unlike any that have gone before or been thought of before. Let God go with you in all these moments and may both he and you share them together. Find life, and don’t let go of it.
