‘YOUTH RENEWED’
Dear Friends,
The step from December into January is a small one. In some ways. Just another day, from a certain point of view. But it’s a big one, too. A threshold of a sorts, as we move from one year into another.
Or a crossroads.
A crossroads where we pause, take stock, and, insofar as we can, and as the need may be, change tack. As the Lord Himself bids us do, we stand at the crossroads and look: we stop long enough at the junction of the years to ‘ask for the ancient paths.’ We consider once more ’where the good way is’, calibrate our compass once again, and resolve that such is the way we will travel – those ‘ancient paths’, tried and tested by long generations of the people of God, the ‘path of peace’ (as Zechariah put it) into which the preaching of the word of God will surely guide us.
There’s always something very apposite about our Christmas celebrations leading on, a mere week later, to this threshold and this crossroads of ‘new year’. The coming of God’s Son changed the whole of history: and when He comes into your life, He changes your whole story too. You turn a corner. You travel now a different path, no longer now the broad road leading to destruction, but the ‘highway to Zion’ (as the psalmist put it), Isaiah’s ‘way of holiness’.
I’m struck by the way in which the apostle Paul drew those lines from the coming of Jesus to the change of direction in the way our lives are lived. Poetry may not have been his own strong suit, but he was happy to quote from others when occasion arose: and the lines that he penned to his dear Philippians friends in describing the coming of Christ were doubtless the fruit of another’s gift of hymnody. And some hymn it is, a shorter, early version in so many ways of the great, Charles Wesley carol, ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’. Describing who He is, why He came, what He did – and how it changes everything.
Christmas is all about the Kingdom. The core values of the Kingdom are writ large across the narrative: submission, service, and sacrifice. All of them involved in, and all of them so strikingly evident in the birth of our Lord and Saviour.
The Son not demanding His dues as deity but humbly submitting to the Father and making Himself nothing. Extraordinary! He who framed the whole, enormous universe, the great eternal God, reduces Himself to the tiniest, miniscule embryo in the virgin womb of a teenage girl – you can’t really make yourself any more ‘nothing’ than that!
And the Sovereign becomes the servant as well, giving His life, as He’d put it later on to His disciples – giving His life as a ransom for many. His humble birth at Bethlehem, with straw more fit for a donkey on which to sleep and a manger for a mattress – that birth was a statement of intent: for He had come to do the ‘donkey’ work. He would do whatever required to be done – the difficult, demanding ‘donkey’ work deliverance would necessitate to secure our truest welfare.
Sacrifice, too, was implicit in the circumstances of His birth in ‘royal’ Bethlehem. ‘There was no guest room available,’ Luke narrates (Lk.2.7). This wasn’t just a rare and unfortunate failure of lastminute.com to come up with the goods: this was, far more significantly, His first painful taste of the curse of the cross that would come. Banished as a baby, as Adam in the infancy of humankind had long ago been banished from the ‘royal’ realm of Eden. ‘Forsaken’ from His earliest days, as at the last He’d bear that dreadful, dark forsakenness by God Himself, and only thus would stanch the foul, relentless flow of the curse of God on sin.
With the birth of Jesus, the King has come: and when Jesus comes, the Kingdom comes, and His coming and His kingdom – they change everything. Our sins are forgiven. Our diseases healed. Our lives are redeemed from the pit.
And our youth is both wonderfully and constantly renewed. Pause for a moment there and ponder that glorious truth.
For those are the lines the apostle thus draws as he shows how the coming of Christ brings a radical change of direction in the way our lives are lived. The Kingdom into which believers enter is the realm in which the King who is eternally the Child forever reigns. G K Chesterton has a marvelous passage in his little book, Orthodoxy, in which he captures just this quintessential character of Christ.
‘Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.’
Indeed. For that’s what the psalmist is surely affirming when he speaks about our youth being renewed like the eagle’s. If sin makes us all grow old, then grace puts the thing in reverse. We start to grow young again: the appetite of infancy is suddenly recovered: the wondering eyes of childhood are restored: the hopes and dreams and energy of youth begin to grow again.
To us a Child is born. Oh, big, bold letters, please! A Child is born. And the government will be on His shoulders. In Christ, the King whose Kingdom pulses with the heartbeat of eternal youth – in Christ we’re given wings, we learn to fly, we start to grow young once more.
And that’s what Paul was on about as well, as he drew those lines from the King and His Kingdom character to the lives that are lived by those who now enter that realm. We start to grow young again.
‘Do everything without grumbling or arguing,’ he writes, as the immediate and necessary sequel to his memorable description of the coming of the King. This is the realm where youth is renewed and the grumpy old man disappears. For, yes, sin does indeed make all of us grow old: and growing old brings grumpiness as well. The ‘grumpy old men’ phenomenon, now something of a byword in society.
But is it really just old men for whom the adjective is apt? It may well often be more marked, pronounced and evident in men – for reasons which I needn’t touch on here – but it’s far from being restricted to just them.
A people and their culture can grow old as well. Humanity itself, as Chesterton observed, has done just that – grown old. Sin has that effect upon us all; it saps the strength from deep within our souls and steals our youth. And growing old, humanity grows grumpy too.
The more we’re removed from our God and His gospel of grace – the more that we distance ourselves, that is, from the Kingdom whose King is the Child – well, the more the traits of grumpiness emerge. Is not that what we’re witnessing now as the ties with our rich spiritual past are loosened and left by the way? We have turned our back on the lordship of Christ. We’ve dismissed His Word, dispensed with His truth, despised His gospel of grace. And such sin, with its subtle sleight of hand, has aged us as a nation. Our land has grown suddenly old.
Where now is that spirit of childhood and youth which once there was, so fierce and so truly free? Where now is that throbbing, ‘abounding vitality’, which flowed from the wells of the Spirit of Christ, and flung countless sons and daughters from this tiny land far across the globe to leave their mark as giants in their various spheres of service? Our land has grown tired, our people grown old. And growing tired and old like that, our land has grown a grumpiness as well.
The language of complaint is ever prevalent: the cries of a people disappointed, disaffected, dissatisfied; the pleas of a people displeased and discontented. Criticism is rampant. Fault-finding’s now an art-form, mud-slinging all too pervasive. Vitriol and venom now erupt like so much lava from the deep volcanic caverns of the darkened human heart. Ruthless. Relentless. Remorseless. The air that we breathe now, day by day, is infused with these toxic fumes of an angry, litigious society, where everyone is a victim, and the only things that matter are ‘my rights’.
Sin makes us all grow old. Turn our backs on the Kingdom whose King is the Child, and no wonder our land has grown old: no wonder our land’s now a grumpy old soul, and the light has gone out of our life. Oh, to put the whole thing in reverse!
Which is just what grace alone does. Our youth is renewed when the Child who was born is revered as the King in our lives. For the coming of Jesus brings a change of direction in the way that our lives will be lived: the values of the Kingdom become infused across the living of our lives. That’s what Paul is on about as he draws those lines of connection: and it’s striking and significant that his first great exhortation addresses and dispenses with the ‘grumpiness’ which is the hallmark of that world which sin has aged and made grow old.
‘Do everything – everything – without grumbling or arguing.’ Grumpiness gets ditched right away. The lights come on. The night sky of a crooked and complaining world is lit up by a plethora of sparkling stars – believers whose whole way of life declares through the dark and the cold of a sin-weary, wintry existence, that there is out there another world, a new world marked by gratitude and grace, a realm whose King is the Child who was born for our sakes, whose life is perpetually vibrant and strong, and whose citizens – all of them – grow only eternally young.
How does it happen? How does that dread, ageing progress of sin get reversed in our lives? How is the grumpiness ditched? We take that trip to Bethlehem and return to the crossroads afresh: we stop there, stand there, stoop there to our knees beside that humble, manger mattress, and we ask for the ‘ancient paths’, to learn ‘where the good way is’.
The ‘good way’? We embrace the Kingdom values. Submission, service, sacrifice.
We submit, first of all – we submit to the lordship of Jesus in our lives. We bow before the Child who was born, as the wise men from the east saw fit to do, and gladly acknowledge that the government is on His shoulders. We embrace and rejoice in His kingship and rule, and we learn to live again.
We gladly do His bidding as His servants and His friends. We hold firmly to His word of life: His Scriptures are the compass and the route map that we use. We learn from Him for daily life: for He is that wonderful Counsellor, and we trust Him for the absolute perfection of His ways. We lean on Him for daily strength: for He is that mighty God, for whom no problem is beyond His power to deal with and resolve. We look to Him for daily grace: for He is the everlasting Father, eager for our welfare, committed to our good. And we leave with Him our daily needs; for He is the Prince of Peace, sovereign in His providence and generous in His care for all His subjects.
We discover the joy of sacrifice. We offer up our bodies day by day, our daily tasks an eager living sacrifice of reverent, loving worship to our King. We offer up a sacrifice of praise – always, always, always giving thanks. See how persistent that emphasis is. Gratitude, not grumpiness or grumbling. Praise for all His benefits. Thanks for what we have and have been given: thanks for what’s been promised and secured for us by Christ: thanks, above all else, for the Child who’s been born, the Son who’s been given, the King who’s enthroned – and in Him our life being restored and our youth being so gloriously renewed.
“For you who revere My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.” May that be how we go out into this coming year, may that be the ‘ancient path’ onto which we each step at the outset of this year!
It remains my great pleasure and privilege to be your minister, to pray God’s blessing for you, and to be truly yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,
Jeremy Middleton