perspective

'Patience' is the value for the month along at the school just now.

The Head was explaining what patience meant today. It's a case of learning to wait, he said.

We want things now. But we have to wait. Wise words.

It's a lesson we all need to learn.

There's a trend in the life of the church in the western world these days which sees some godly people beginning not only to want things now, but expecting these things as well.

Heaven, on earth. The gospel of the here and now. When the Bible says, Not yet.

I think that a lot of the trouble derives from a loosening hold on the fact of the resurrection.

Lose sight of that, lose your hold on the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that his thus being raised both guarantees and pointedly pre-figures a day of final resurrection at the last - lose sight of that and you slowly start compressing all the gospel into here and now parameters.

Our generation has largely now lost that breadth of perspective which the gospel deliberately gives.

If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men," as one of the good guys put it.

If it's only all about the here and now, then there's not a lot we've got to offer anyone.

I called by on a family who've been bereaved, on one of my many journeys back and forth to the school. It's precisely this shortened perspective which sees them all struggling so much.

If the good news of God is all about life in the here and the now ... well, it doesn't amount to that much.

But that's exactly the point, of course. It simply isn't about the here and now: not primarily at least. It's bigger by far than that.

And my task, I suppose, in home after home, is stretching the people's perspective. Enabling these folk, conditioned to think that it's somehow their right to have all of the good things right now - enabling these folk to embrace a much longer perspective, to think in terms of a world to come as well as the world we know, to live in the light of the coming resurrection.

It's a challenge. Our generation's besotted with having things now.

Good things may come to those who wait, they used to say. The Guinness advert still does.

But why can't you just have them now? I mean .. put them on your credit card: get yourself a mortgage. You owe it to yourself to have these good things now.

Our whole nation, it seems, is run on these lines. How many billions of pounds are we all in debt? Buy now, pay later. Who needs to worry? A future generation will be picking up the bill. (That rising generation is probably now beginning to worry, of course!)

Preaching the gospel involves us today not only declaring the message, but stretching a people's perspective.

And that only can come when the fact of Jesus' resurrection becomes the central fact of life. That changes everything. That transforms our perspective.

So I take my time later on in the day preparing again for the funeral service tomorrow. What I say is important. It's a chance to be stretching perspectives. It's a chance to be pointing to Jesus. It's a chance to be moving these mourners to a wholly different vantage point.

It takes me long hours to work at this: to weave the message the Lord, I'm sure, wants heard - to weave that message through all the individual details of the life that the deceased was glad to live.

I'm praying they'll know the presence and the comfort of the Lord.

I'm praying that their perspective will begin to shift.

I'm praying they'll hear the very voice of God.