Dear Friends,
We have a tradition here of a healthy hike on New Year’s Day up Scolty Hill, near Banchory.
It’s not a Munro by any stretch of the imagination. Nor, though, is it a stroll in the park. It’s suitably in-between. And perhaps for some, on the back of a whole week’s worth of festive fare, it feels just a bit like a mini-Munro.
I don’t really know how it all began – nor when – but across the years it grew to be a cherished Gilc tradition. And whatever the reasons as to why this became a start-of-the-year sort of ‘signature tune’ for the fellowship here, there’s a certain, striking symbolism involved. It isn’t just a healthy dose of exercise: it’s a great, symbolic statement of intent as well.
To put it in a slightly different way, it’s a visual, almost visceral, reminder at the outset of another year as to who we are as followers of Christ and what we are about. We’re hikers who are headed for the heights, pilgrims on the pathway home. We’re a rag-tag crowd of worshippers stepping out in simple faith and starting up the hill of God.
Our bottom-line identity is simply this – we’re followers of Jesus, disciples of the risen Lord.
And the hike to the top of Scolty Hill is as good and graphic a picture of the life of that discipleship as any you can find: it’s a ‘setting-the-scene’ sort of venture, a type of acted parable to introduce and complement our present Sunday morning series on the so-called “songs of ascent”.
Those 15 well-loved psalms within the psalter were the songbook of the Israelites (it would seem) on the arduous, annual pilgrimage they took three times a year to celebrate the goodness of their great delivering God. Up to the ridge of the long Judean plateau, up to the famed Jerusalem, up to the city and temple and presence of the great eternal God. Always up and up and up, no matter where you started from. A hike up the hill to the house of God.
And that journey was always a picture for them of a yet more significant journey to which they knew they’d been called.
It was the journey on which the patriarchs all had been set: looking forwards and onwards and upwards, way beyond the mountains of Judea, way beyond Jerusalem, onwards and up “to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” is how the writer to the Hebrews has described them (Heb.11.10), pressing on, he declared, to that “better country – a heavenly one” (Heb.11.16) for which, deep down, they were longing.
It was the journey on which the great poet king himself had also been set, following his Shepherd God along those “paths of righteousness” (Ps.23.3), a road that was sometimes scarily hard and dark, and fraught all along with many a danger and foe – but a road that was taking him safely and finally home, able at last to “dwell in the house (or the home) of the Lord for ever” (Ps.23.6).
It’s that same path we travel today as we follow the Lord Jesus Christ: following Him to what the New Testament calls ‘the new Jerusalem’. This world is but a staging post: it’s not our final home. We, too, are yearning for that brighter, ‘better country’ – to which, we’ve come to see, our Jesus is the way.
These 15 ‘songs of ascent’ become our songbook too: they’re a handy “hiker’s handbook” as it were, a manual on discipleship to help us get our bearings on that journey, and to see just what’s involved in being a follower of Christ. None of the songs are long at all (some are very short indeed) and the way that they’ve been packaged together is a simple, sequential ‘A-to-Z’ of the life of the believer.
Clear. Compact. Concise. Discipleship in a nutshell. How it begins. What it involves. Where it ends. A little, pocket-sized portfolio which tells you in brief what you need to know to get on the road that’ll take you finally home.
It’s a much-needed booklet right now. For the challenge of following Jesus has been sadly and subtly usurped and replaced by a self-centred ‘easy-believism’, so frequently, falsely being pedaled today by those ‘quick-fix’ practitioners of grace who know what the market desires and demands and will buy.
Which brings me back to Scolty Hill and the simple, scribbled ‘sketch-book’ which our Ne-er Day walk well constitutes. An outdoor variation on the ‘Pictionary’ approach, it represents, as I say, a statement of intent at the start of another year: a commitment again to the path of Christ’s discipleship and that journey to the final ‘new Jerusalem’ to come.
So here are some of the lessons which the Scolty hill tradition underlines.
Discipleship’s always deliberate. Scolty isn’t on your doorstep: you don’t ever roll out of bed in the morning, and there you are at the place. It requires deliberate intent and, for most, no small effort as well, to get yourself there to the start.
Discipleship works like that. The decision to follow the Lord Jesus Christ can involve, in your reaching that point, quite a journey in itself. For some it can take a very long time. For some it can mean a trying and tortuous period of spiritual travel, with a load of wrong turns, the frustration of countless dead-ends, and that final sharp turn in the road which the Bible calls ‘repentance’.
No one ever drifts into discipleship. It isn’t a thing that you do in your dreams: it’s never just a nice idea to which you mentally subscribe. There’s a place you need to get to, a path you need to follow, a point you need to reach, a people you need to join.
Discipleship of Jesus is an uphill life. Scolty may not be Mount Everest – but, equally, it’s not the flat-as-a-pancake prairie plains of Canada. It’s step-by-step up that you’re having to go, not an effortless, lazy free-wheeling down some easy slope. The hike up Scolty is sheer hard graft as, defiant, you go against gravity.
Because there is as well, in the realm of the spirit, a strong gravitational pull. A downwards pull of no small force, which the Bible describes as sin. It’s the ingrained, innate pull of the rotten, rebellious self. The pull towards a self-indulgent, self-advancing, self-important, and inherently self-centred way of life.
Discipleship of Jesus dares to defy this gravity.
Commitment to Jesus takes precedence over our comfort. The resolve to be glorifying God displaces our previous passion to gratify only ourselves. Submission to Jesus as Saviour and Lord takes the place of the sovereign sway in the living of life which we’d formerly assumed for ourselves.
We become humble learners instead of arrogant know-alls. We acknowledge our weakness instead of attempting somehow to be strong. We choose the lifestyle of service instead of the pleasures of leisure.
We go against the grain of this great gravity. And it’s hard and tiring uphill work, as step by step we tread the track along which Jesus leads us.
Discipleship involves demanding discipline. The ‘steps’ of faith by which we tread this path of Christ’s discipleship are not a comfortable metaphor: they’re actual, practical, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other steady steps.
We set aside time to read and to study the Bible: to hear what the Lord has to say: to learn from the Lord how to live this new life we now have: to have our eyes opened to why we’ve gone wrong and to how we start getting things right: to put on the ‘glasses’ the Scriptures provide and to focus at last on just who God is and what He has done and how He works and why Jesus matters so much.
That’s a discipline. A disciplined, going-against-the-grain-of-gravity step of faith which we resolutely take.
We make the time and find the place to pray. Another discipline. Another step of faith. Not something easy at all. Hard, uphill hiking as we seek to meet with God. Quietly, confidently – confident only in Christ, of course, but confident nonetheless – confidently coming into the presence of God: to praise Him for His greatness: to thank Him for His mercies: to ask Him for His intervening grace to meet the needs of others and ourselves: to move His hand and see that mighty arm stretched out again in saving, healing, helping power across the globe: and thereby too to see His name being glorified.
When time is short and there are always so many other things we’re keen to do: when we’ve so many ‘screens’ and there are always so many things to ‘view’: then we’re easily distracted, permanently pressurised, regularly tired, both physically and mentally. ‘Gravity’, in other words, will always militate against such times of prayer: discipline’s required.
Discipleship is an uphill climb: the sweat-inducing, stitch-creating discipline of one-step-then-another up the hill – defying sinful gravity. Reading the Bible: a discipline. Engaging in prayer: a discipline. Prioritising weekly Lord’s Day worship: a discipline. Giving to others – of your time, your wealth, your resources, your home: a discipline. Alert and obedient to the Spirit and Word of the Lord; a discipline. Going where He points you: doing what He tells you: living how He shows you: a discipline.
Uphill, gravity-defying steps of faith. The disciplines of discipleship.
Discipleship of Jesus is a communal way of life. The car park out at Scolty is a meeting point, as well as being the starting point. You don’t climb Scolty alone. There’s a whole crowd of others converging for the hike. Old and young. New-comers, old-timers. The experts and the novices. The fit and the frail, the lean and the lame. A liquorice-all-sorts collection of these new year’s day adventurers, all of them game for the challenge, all of them up for the hike.
Discipleship’s the same. We don’t follow Jesus alone: it’s inherently a communal activity, a plural and relational sort of enterprise. Keeping one another on the path. Standing by each other when the track becomes a trial. Picking one another off the ground when someone slips and falls. Encouraging those who are flagging. Supporting those who are tiring. Reassuring those who are wondering now how far they still have to go and fearing they’ll not make the top.
The communal life. We talk as well as walk. We laugh as well as lug ourselves and others up the hill. We live life together in following Christ. Discipleship and fellowship are flip-sides of the same essential thing, our hiking on to heaven, and our heading gladly home. Because there at the top the crowd will have grown and we’ll find in that future that heaven is a world of love – and that’s why there’s that multitude, too vast for mathematics to compute, who’ll be gathered there at last. We’re heading home – and ‘home’ is just as much a people as a place!
Discipleship is full of surprises. Storm Arwen a few weeks before had ensured this year that the way which was normally taken was presently blocked.
Storms happen in life. ‘Storms’, of one sort and another, which can overnight quite change the whole familiar landscape of our lives. Illness. Bereavement. Redundancy. Betrayal. The path we’d assumed we would follow now blocked and our living now roundly re-routed.
Such storms are disturbing, distressing. They can leave us disappointed, dismayed, disoriented. They can stir an emotional cauldron: anger, perplexity, shame: resentment, despair, and deep hurt. Storms happen. Unexpected, and just as unwanted. Times when we need more than ever the One who is Himself the way, who’s trod this path before us and who’s navigated storms far more severe than any now we may ourselves confront. He keeps us right and leads us through the tangled devastation which such storms will often leave.
There are other surprises as well, of course. Sudden, unanticipated vistas on the way when our eyes are opened wide to gain a fuller, far more ‘panoramic’ view of all that Jesus is – breath-taking, mind-blowing, heart-pumping glimpses of a glory still to come when finally the top is reached.
And at the top, yes, a tower. Impressive and imposing. The strong tower. The safe place. The ‘rock’ as it were which is our lasting refuge. That’s where the path always leads: to the Lord. The Lord who has been all along our rock, our fortress, our deliverer; the one in whom we take refuge, the one who has been and will be our shield, our strong tower, our great ‘granite hideout’ (as The Message translates it) where at last we will always be safe: around whom we’ll gather in marvelling praise, delighting in the cool, invigorating freshness of the mountain air, revelling in the captivating beauty which we see, glad now we’re finally home, glad beyond all words that this was the path we chose to tread, that this was where it led: and finding as we do so that the songs of ascent we’ve been singing en route all converge, like so many rivers of praise, into one great, endless crescendo of thrilling and rapturous praise.
With my gratitude always for the privilege and joy that it is to share with you all this hike of Christ’s discipleship,
Yours in His glad service,
Jeremy Middleton