All at sea

 

September 2020

A small dinghy needs a painter, not someone with a paintbrush to keep the boat looking great but a length of rope for tying it to a larger boat or to moor it.  You can’t just park your boat on the water and hope it will be there when you next come back!  Even ships need ropes to attach them to something immovable like the dockside.  But ‘dry land’ is only relatively immovable.  Mooring posts can fail, banks can give way.  Some people who experience an earthquake say how deeply unsettling it is to discover that solid ground is not as solid as they had thought – if even the ground can move what is there left to moor our lives to?!

Last month, tragically, many in Beirut discovered the fragility of their world as the terrifying explosion in their port destroyed homes and businesses and flung lethal shards of glass at them.  This year many have been shocked to see a new virus taking lives all over the world while our collective reaction has destroyed livelihoods, businesses and dreams in a moment, with the sad expectation that the peak of the wave of economic misery is yet to come.

And in smaller, but no less painful, ways many find that the rocks in our life – like relationships, health, and jobs – can be surprisingly wobbly.  That is why the Bible has always urged us to build on a more secure foundation, to tie our boat to a more solid post, to anchor our lives on the Rock that never moves. 

“You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.  Trust in the Lord for ever, for the Lord, the Lord, is the Rock eternal.”  (Isaiah 26:3-4)  Jesus’ life was engulfed by the flood of hatred and jealousy that took him to a painful and humiliating death for us but God raised him to new life and installed him as the Commander of the Universe.  Our trust in the Lord Jesus is like an unbreakable rope anchoring us forever to the fixed centre of the universe, firm and secure through any storm that might batter us, in life or death.

What’s your painter tied to?

Sincerely

Graham Burrows

Smuggled Goods

August 2020

What would you do if your business was declared illegal but you were convinced that it was good and necessary?

That was the dilemma that faced William Tyndale when his chosen trade was getting him into hot water; he wanted to print English Bibles.  Amazingly, apart from a few English Bibles read secretly for fear of execution, the only Bibles in England at the time were in Latin, which hardly anyone understood.  The pre-Reformation church and Henry VIII did not want people to know what this dangerous book actually said – they might realise that the church had been teaching nonsense, and that the king himself had things to answer for.

So in 1524 Tyndale fled England having declared to a hostile clergyman, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.”  Living as a hunted exile he translated the New Testament from the original Greek into English, had them printed in Antwerp and smuggled back into England where they were eagerly bought and read.  Ordinary people would pay as much as a load of hay just to get a few pages, and would sit up all night hearing the Scriptures read.  The authorities did all they could to seize and burn those books.

Tyndale went on to translate part of the Old Testament too but in 1535 an Englishman secretly working for the King betrayed Tyndale, he was imprisoned near Brussels for 18 months and then convicted of heresy.  Tied to a stake, but before he was strangled and his body burnt, he called out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”  Two years later Henry VIII ordered that an English Bible be placed in every church in England.  These Bibles were revised versions of the texts that Tyndale had created.

500 years on, where is the hunger for God’s Word that was so characteristic of England in Tyndale’s day, and how many of us would risk our lives to defy Bible ‘gagging orders’ or to handle smuggled Bibles?  “Lord, open England’s eyes again!”

Sincerely

Graham Burrows