Two generations ago the name of Elton Trueblood was much better known. A Quaker, a philosopher, a teacher, and a trusted guide on how to live faithfully and generously in a world losing faith in faith itself. I was introduced to the books of Elton Trueblood by my late friend and pastoral mentor, the Rev Jim Taylor, one of the finest Scottish Baptist ministers of his generation and mine. I owe Jim many debts, amongst them the forty years of spiritual and intellectual fellowship nourished by regular phone calls, conversations over coffee, time spent at conferences together, and yes, in the days before email, occasional letters written in his small, neat and perfectly legible script.
Early in my first ministry I was on holiday on a caravan site in Crieff in Scotland, and I had brought with me The Yoke of Christ, the edited volume of Trueblood's sermons. By then I had completed an Arts degree in moral philosophy and comparative religion, and a full course of theological and pastoral education. I knew right away I was reading sermons by someone who fully grasped the meaning of Jesus words, "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." These sermons were thoughtful, aimed to persuade and convince of their truth, and unadorned by clever illustrations or jokes. Rather, Elton Trueblood broke the bread of the scripture text and shared it, believing that those who were hungry would recognise bread when they saw it, or read it.
So began a long friendship in writing with Trueblood and his books. When ten years later, in 1984, I moved to Aberdeen, I borrowed a couple of Trueblood books from the University Library. Those two books are still there, though now in what is called, unencouragingly, the remote store! Even the titles are provocative and intended to intrigue; The Incendiary Fellowship, and The New Man for Our Time. There are actually 10 Trueblood titles in the library, all in the remote store, though easily enough recalled.
The world has changed beyond recognition since Trueblood was writing. Who knows what he would have made of our obsessions with entertainment as distraction, our anxious clinging to all kinds of 'connectivity', the globalised world of trade and commerce, the multi-cultural pluralities that bring their benefits, but with accompanying and at times dangerous tensions and resentments. And he wrote in the style of the cultured, thoughtful, intellectual man he was, his context mid 20th Century, his tone urbane American. But Christians of all people should know that the truth of the Christian tradition remains potent and authentic, even when expressed in the languages and idiom of previous generations. C. S. Lewis took care of what he called 'chronological snobbery' in his essay 'On the Reading of Old Books'. In any case, Trueblood's books are not all that old; and our contemporary habits of writing, reading and information transfer are not so superior as to entitle us to be dismissive of those whose knowledge of God and his ways retains a wisdom we are in danger of losing, and resources we do well to harvest.
So I'm back to reading Trueblood, starting with his sermons, the first one of his books I ever read. Then I'll trouble the librarians at the remote store to send over some more. That should give me enough over the summer to confirm I am not suffering from an outbreak of nostalgia, but returning to one of the places where good drinking water can be found for the thirsty.
Monday
Titus 3.4-5a “But when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us…”
That word ‘saved’ is too easily overlooked, or understated, or dulled by overuse. This is a miracle word and it means when everything was at stake, when we were lost beyond our own help, God intervened. The kindness and love of God appeared in the gift and revelation of God’s Son, Jesus. This old apostle is in the process of establishing his legacy in the form of a faith community in which the risen Son of God, Jesus Christ, is present by his Spirit – to save, and keep, and guide. Grateful worship has always been the living evidence that we are saved, and we know it.
Tuesday
Titus 3.5 “He saved us not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy…”
We are saved not by our best efforts, but by the kindness, love, and mercy of God. These three keywords of Christian vocabulary are required to express something of the sheer gift and undeserved grace, of what God has done for sinners through the work of Christ. Once saved, of course, God requires us to live by that same grace into holiness and righteousness. Being saved by God’s mercy and justified by grace, is “a status which must then be demonstrated in practice in righteous living.”
Wednesday
Titus 3.5 “He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
Deep echoes here of that late night conversation with Nicodemus about being born again by the Holy Spirit. There can be no more radical new beginning than being born again. Our moral life, our inner drives of love and desire and hope, so often distorted by sin into possessiveness, greed and self-serving, are all of them reset in a renewal only possible by the cleansing and enabling power of the Holy Spirit. No wonder Paul said, “If anyone is in Christ – new creation!” And all by the kindness, love and mercy of God. We really should take more time to sit down and wonder at all of that!
Thursday
Titus 3.6 “The Holy Spirit whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Saviour.”
The language is still about the extravagant grace and generosity of God. The Holy Spirit is given without measure, a reminder of John’s vivid memory: “From the fullness of his grace we have all received, one blessing after another.” (John 1.16) God gives of himself in his fullness in Christ and by the Holy Spirit. Not only so, it is all mediated through Jesus Christ our Saviour. There is no more convincing sign of the saved soul than grateful love, lived out in faithful service to church and world, and continually celebrated in lifelong praise to the Saviour.
Friday
Titus 3.7 “So that having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.”
Being justified by grace means we are not heirs by right, but by gift. In Romans Paul spells this out much more fully: “The Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ…” The hope of eternal life is not set round with conditions, or ‘ifs and buts’. This hope is secured in our relationship to God, through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s what being saved means, to live faithfully and hopefully towards our future in eternal fellowship with God.
Saturday
Titus 3.8 “This is a trustworthy saying.”
In the Letters to Timothy and Titus, Paul repeatedly tells those who will hear his letters read, “This is a trustworthy saying.” Believe it; stake your life on it; act on the truth of it; accept it into your heart and mind and let its truth and trustworthiness be fuel for your faith, day in and day out. Read Titus 3.1-7 again, because the truth Paul is telling is well worthy of your deepest trust and strongest confidence in God. For your interest here are the other ‘faithful sayings’: (1 Timothy 1.15; 3.1; 4.8; 2 Timothy 2.11-12; Titus 3.8). Find time to ponder these trustworthy sayings too.
Sunday
Titus 3.8-9 “This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. These things are excellent and profitable for everyone.”
It’s not a bad motto: “Be careful to devote yourselves to doing what is good.” Careful means not being careless about those opportunities that always come our way to make someone else’s life better. Being devoted and loving God, makes us morally predictable about our choices of behaviour, about the words we speak, and how we think. Because God in his kindness, love and mercy has saved us through Jesus Christ, and cleansed and renewed us by the Holy Spirit poured out all over our lives in blessing and enabling grace – because of all that, we take great care to live gratefully, generously, and hopefully, as befits those who are saved and belong to the Saviour. Quite a thing to live a life profitable to everyone! Good deeds change the world!
Monday
Our blest Redeemer, ere he breathed his tender, last farewell,
a guide, a Comforter, bequeathed with us to dwell.
Behind this verse is the promise of Jesus, “”I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth.” Pentecost is the fulfilling of that promise. The Holy Spirit is the generous bequest of Jesus, the gift that can’t be bought, the risen Christ made present by his Spirit. This whole hymn is a quiet thanksgiving for the One who comes to believing hearts as wisdom, counsel, strength and the deep assurance that we are indeed, children of God
Tuesday
He came in semblance of a dove, with sheltering wings outspread,
The holy balm of peace and love on earth to shed.
The descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism combines with the image of sheltering wings. Another hymn tells this well: “O spread thy covering wings around, till all our wanderings cease.” Amongst the great blessings of the Holy Spirit’s coming to dwell in the community of Christ, and in each trusting heart, are the peace and the love of God shed abroad in the heart, in the Christian community, and out the doors into the world where Christ died and rose again, a God-loved world.
Wednesday
He came in tongues of living flame, to teach, convince, subdue;
As peaceful as the wind he came, as viewless too.
Sometimes the poetry isn’t as good as the words! But this verse interprets Pentecost as the gift of the Holy Spirit to all Jesus’ followers, then and now. The flame of God’s love, burning the truth into the heart, convincing of both sin and its remedy in Christ, subduing our pride and bringing us to the place of prayer, gratitude and obedience. The wind at Pentecost wasn’t peaceful, it was disruptive – but perhaps the hymn writer was thinking about Jesus words to Nicodemus, the movement of the Spirit made visible by the effects on the leaves, and that same Spirit’s effects made visible in lives born again into the Kingdom of God.
Thursday
He came sweet influence to impart, a gracious, willing guest,
while he can find one humble heart wherein to rest.
The hymn writer’s devotional instincts are finely tuned. The Holy Spirit does not gate-crash, though there is potency and persistence in the grace of God working away to open doors locked from the inside by guilt, fear, shame, pride and much else that keeps us at a distance from God. The heart that is humbled by the patient love of God revealed in Christ, the heart convicted of sin and turned towards God in repentance and prayer for forgiveness – that heart is exactly the place where the Holy Spirit comes, and dwells, and becomes the primary influencer of the heart, emotions, will, and mind.
Friday
And his that gentle voice we hear, soft as the breath of even,
that checks each fault, that calms each fear, and speaks of heaven.
The great Reformers often spoke of “the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.” By this they meant when we read our Bibles prayerfully, we are asking the Spirit to “teach, convince, subdue.” The Spirit is continually at work towards our sanctification, in maintaining the sensitivity of the conscience when faced with temptation, by the training of the mind in our thinking with the mind of Christ, in the control of our emotions and affections as we respond to life’s routines and surprises. The work of the Holy Spirit is “God at work in us both to do and to will his good pleasure.”
Saturday
And every virtue we possess, and every victory won,
and every thought of holiness, are his alone.
This is the most famous and most often quoted verse of this hymn – at least in the circles I moved in for much of my earlier Christian life and ministry. The author, Henriette Auber, was well aware we are saved by grace – it’s never our own doing. Likewise whatever is good in us is good enabled by the inner working of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness with our spirits that we are assuredly children of God. We are what we are, we are who we are, by the grace of God. Far from being a devaluation of our best efforts, our dependence on God’s grace as we are being conformed to the image of Christ, is what enables and empowers us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who is at work in us”!
Sunday
Spirit of purity and grace, our weakness pitying, see:
O make our hearts thy dwelling-place, and worthier thee.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The hymn writer used early Victorian language – the word pity refers to the compassion and affectionate sympathy of God who knows and sees and understands our struggles. The Holy Spirit is the Counsellor and Comforter who indwells the mind and knows our motives and intentions, our mistakes and failures, and whose work is to conform us to the image of Christ – to make us more like Jesus. That’s the prayer of this entire hymn!
Monday
Acts 2.1-2 “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.”
C. S. Lewis once longed for the gales of God to blow again through the dusty cobwebs of a passive church. He wasn’t wrong in his longing. These two verses are more than a weather report, they are the Church’s first weather forecast about the power of the Holy Spirit to be seen and heard where the followers of Jesus are gathered together. And so we pray, “O Breath of Life, come sweeping through us / revive your church with life and power.”
Tuesday
Acts 2.2 “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.”
Pentecost was a dramatic interruption that woke the disciples from resignation, uncertainty, timidity about the future, and that lethargy we all recognise when something seems too big to tackle. The sudden noise, the forceful energy, the disruptive effect of power pervading ‘the whole house’ – what to do in face of so much evidence of church decline, fading faith, loss of direction and a world less and less hospitable to Christian life and witness? Perhaps pray for a personal Pentecost, and a local community Pentecost, another blessed interruption to routine faith!
Wednesday
Acts 2.3 “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
Wind and fire are not the elements of tameness or sameness. The wind is a force that overturns, whips up, impels forward if the wind is at our back. Fire consumes, illumines, warms, purifies and extracts pure metal in furnace heat. The separation of the flames into a gift of flame to each one present, is a remarkable picture of the Holy Spirit falling on the community and hovering over each person. The coming of the Holy Spirit is the realisation in our experience of Jesus’ promise of the Spirit as the Father’s gift. “Kindle a flame of sacred love, on the mean altar of my heart.”
Thursday
Acts 2. 4 “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”
While the gift of tongues came later in Christian worship, in Acts the Spirit becomes both the speaker and the interpreter. The Jesus’ followers spoke in a language they had not learned, to people able to understand them. The Gospel can’t be constrained by any one language – the good news is to all people. That long list of peoples, tribes and nations in Jerusalem represented many languages – and the Spirit ensured that they heard of “the wonders of God.” (v11) It may be that the Church today is being called to discover and grow new ways of telling, showing and enacting the good news of Jesus crucified and risen. And not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of God.
Friday
O Thou who camest from above, the pure celestial fire to impart,
kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.
Jesus said he would not leave them orphaned, abandoned or left to their own devices. The coming of the Spirit, the gift of the Father, is the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise. Wesley recognised both the glory of the fire and the ordinariness of the altar. Even a love worthy of Jesus would have to come as gift, a flame from heaven sent to ignite everything in us that will burn. And so Wesley’s prayer, becomes our prayer, “Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.”
Saturday
“There let it for Thy glory burn with inextinguishable blaze,
and trembling to its source return, in humble prayer and fervent praise.”
“The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.” (Lev. 6.13) Wesley describes the Christian heart as an ordinary altar, nothing special. But when sacred love is kindled by the inner working of the Spirit, the heart burns with devotion and creates communion between the glory of heaven and the trusting heart. The result is a life of humble prayer and fervent praise, a life ignited and kept constantly ablaze by the renewing and refuelling power of the Holy Spirit.
Sunday
Jesus, confirm my heart's desire to work and speak and think for Thee,
still let me guard the holy fire, and still stir up Thy gift in me.
Ready for all Thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat,
till death Thy endless mercies seal, and make my sacrifice complete.
On this Pentecost Sunday, let Wesley’s hymn become your prayer. Against the backdrop of the upper room, invaded by the gales of God, sanctified by the flames of divine love, we ask for a fresh kindling in our own hearts and heads, of love for God, love for Christ’s church, and love for this God-loved world. May our whole lives be an incendiary witness to the fierce and holy love of God. By the power of the Spirit, may God’s holy fire burn with inextinguishable blaze, His love audible and visible in us.
Monday
Matthew 12.36 “But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgement for every empty word they have spoken.”
A tree is known by its fruit, and followers of Jesus will be known by their works and words. What we say matters. This is more than a warning against lies, though that’s included. Empty words includes careless words, wounding words, and words that aid what is bad by minimising or excusing what is wrong. The follower of Jesus uses words carefully, caringly and as an audible witness of what is good, true and genuinely careful of the consequences of what we say. It would be easy to reduce the warning in Jesus’ words, but what Jesus is saying to each of us is that we will have to explain to God those words that did nothing to make our world better.
Tuesday
Matthew 12.37 “For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”
A few verses earlier Jesus described where words come from – they only reach the mouth by way of the heart. Our words have moral significance, and like mirrors they reflect the kind of person we are. When someone apologises for using insulting and derogatory words by saying, “That isn’t me”, they are avoiding the deeper truth that no one else said them – they did. “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (v34) Perhaps what Jesus means about us being responsible for empty and careless words is all those words that erupt without thinking from our heart, and that tell everyone who hears them who we really are.
Wednesday
James 1.26 “If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.”
In the world of Jesus and James, words were not merely communication sounds. Words do things, change things. Words make or break relationships, build or break trust. Hate speech is a thing. Prejudice does poison communities. James is echoing Jesus about uncontrolled speech that damages the social fabric and reveals who we truly are. Our devotion to Jesus, our Christian piety, the genuineness of all we say and sing in prayer and worship, is daily tested by how we speak and what we say.
Thursday
James 1.27 “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
James is the most practical of people, and again he echoes Jesus – we are recognisable by our fruits. What we do backs up how we speak. When we show compassion and care for orphans, widows and anyone else who needs support, we reveal what is going on in our heart and mind. A compassionate inner life spontaneously speaks carefully and caringly, “for out of the heart the mouth speaks”. In a world of too much rough speaking and aggressive language, what we say and how we say it as Christians, speaks volumes!
Friday
James 3.9-10 “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.”
The default setting of the tongue is to praise the Creator. To denigrate, insult or wound those made in God’s image contradicts our every prayer of praise. In our word soaked culture, we seem less and less able to understand the lethal nature of weaponised words. James is encouraging Christians who have to mix and live within a surrounding culture to allow their speech to be governed, moderated and guided by their primary calling – which is to worship and serve a righteous God.
Saturday
James 3.17-18 “The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”
“Lord, give me wisdom before I open my big mouth!” I know, it’s not the most elegant of liturgical creations, but how many times have we wished we had prayed such sentiments more often? Here is James at his most pastoral and constructive. May God give us that gift and discipline of wise speaking, so that in our words we are peacemakers whose words are seeds sown in peace that will reap a harvest of righteousness. The New Testament takes seriously the potential of well spoken words to weave the ways of peace into the patterned fabric of healthy community relationships.
Sunday
Psalm 19.16 “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
What a prayer with which to start each day! Or before a difficult conversation; or a meeting where there are clashing agendas. Does what I say please God? Could I say this knowing that God is present in the room? Speech is God’s gift, an instrument of praise. Our words are to be gifts that enrich, encourage, bring peace, restrain anger, and show love. Let God be the Rock that gives grace and stability to our speaking.
