Staying Behind - A South African Story

The past few weeks have been crazy in our family. And things will remain crazy for some time to come as arrangements are made and news-updates sent hither and thither. A house that has to be sold, work interviews over skype, earthly possessions needing to be reduced. Really crazy.

I am the youngest of three children. We are all married and the other two both have children. Both of them, with their respective families, have now decided to move to new shores. They are emigrating. My sister and her family will be leaving within the next two months and my brother and his family will follow shortly after.

We have always been close. We love to go camping together and do family stuff. It is great fun to just come together for a Sunday lunch, as we really enjoy one another’s company. Our mother is still alive, and lives in another part of the country, by the sea, and the rest of us live close together in the middle of the country in Gauteng. Our dearest memories are going home, to the sea and Mother, all of us at the same time. This means some of us sleep in an outside room and some get the living room carpet and the couches. Its crazy, but it is fun and we go for at least three weeks over Christmas if we can. We dearly love being together.

With this background you can understand why I am taking the news of their leaving a bit hard. It has been a time for intense soul searching and asking deep questions, of ourselves and one another. It is true that for many people in South Africa the concept of having family-members living all around the globe has become a common occurrence. There are few white South Africans left who do not have some branch of their family living overseas. We ourselves already have some distant cousins living overseas.

The question is why? Why are so many people leaving for what they sincerely hope will be better quality of life? There are few people who still see Nelson Mandela's rainbow nation as a reality. Even to the rest of the world it is becoming clear that merely getting rid of the apartheid regime was perhaps not the whole solution. Perhaps the world was a little naïve in believing that handing the government to black people to rule themselves would be the beginning of a golden era.

Things in South Africa are difficult, and not for white people only. Crime affects all of us and no family, white or black or brown, has not been affected by it. People are in pain in so many different ways and it is totally impossible to describe, in this blogpost, the ways in which each and every people-group in this country feels betrayed by others. In our government and at all other levels of power corruption has become a byword. Even the jokes about it are not funny anymore. Laws are changing and we may soon lose our freedom of speech and even free enterprise may become another sacrifice. We know these things are happening, and that means we have decisions to make.

When we start looking for God's will, we need to understand that God works differently with each of us. To Abraham God said, take your family and belongings and go to a different country that I will show you. To Moses God said go back to your own people and take them away from Egypt. Others, such as Gideon, Deborah, Samson, God raised up to be deliverers of their own people. Yet another one of God's servants was Esther, who was taken out of her social class into the palace, because the Lord said He wanted her in a place of influence, for the sake of her own people, for their deliverance in such a time as this.

Many other examples exist, showing that there is no right and wrong way of obeying God. We cannot take one Biblical example and appropriate it for all. We need to hear what God says to each of us individually.

Needless to say, the past few weeks have been weeks of profound soul-searching and many questions. We each had to examine our own motives. For my siblings, their children come first and that is as it should be. As parents they are responsible for giving their offspring the best chances possible and those chances, for white children, might not be in South Africa anymore for the simple reason that white young people struggle to find jobs.

It seems clear that their calling is the same as Abraham's, to pack up their families and belongings and go to a new place. It may even happen, in years to come, that the children will be sent back to their own people, but that is not at issue right now.

So why am I staying behind? Why are my husband and I convinced that we should remain in South Africa? Are we just too dumb to see the dangers around us, or are we just too complacent and idle to pack up and begin our lives again, from scratch? We do not think so. In asking ourselves these questions over the past few weeks, as we have, indeed, many times through the course of our marriage, we are convinced that we already are where God wants us. As we do not have children our first consideration need not be their future. We believe God wants us here. We cannot go just because everyone else is going either. We need to be sure of where God wants us.

We sincerely believe we can make a difference here. We cannot change this country, we know that, but we can and do change the lives of those people who cross our paths. We understand these people because they are our people. We know the history of this country like no-one else, because it is our history. We understand the Church, because we know the triumphs and the shame of the church in its handling of the people of this country. I studied theology and pastoral counselling and ethics, because it addresses the needs that exist in this country.

My husband and I are not sticking our heads into a hole as an ostrich does, trying to convince ourselves that there are no problems in this country. We are not naïve and innocent. We know there are problems in this country and that some of these problems will get worse, but we also know that there are people here, good people, people who ask to be understood, who ask for compassion and encouragement. We can give that, because we understand and because God is using us to give peace, compassion, teaching and encouragement to people who are hurting on so many levels.

I understand why my family is leaving South Africa, and I believe it is God's will for them to go and do the best for a next generation. I believe that God is going with them and that they will become part of God's plan for this world, wherever they are. I also believe that we are staying behind, because that is God's will for us and we are part of God's plan for this country.

But it is not easy, not for a single one of us!!!

Christ the Centre

Gospel of John 6:48-58



I have recently worked on an Afrikaans Bible Study using the above passage.  We examined what Jesus meant when He calls Himself the BREAD OF LIFE. In this passage Jesus refers to the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert and likens Himself to the manna. He then continues to talk about how everyone who wants to be a part of Him needs to eat His body (as the Bread of Life) and drink His blood. As I was engaging with this passage, puzzling it out I saw a picture of Christ standing with both arms stretched out, one hand reaching into the past and the other reaching out to the future.



I do not claim that this picture was prophetic or a direct revelation of God, but I see it as a visual aid for a Biblical truth that we sometimes tend to forget. Jesus is the one who is indeed the centre of all of History. When Jesus points to the manna in the wilderness He points us to that part of Biblical history where the Israelites were freed from bondage in Egypt, going to the land that was promised to their forefathers. This narrative points us symbolically to the Salvation the Messiah will one day work on the cross so that we, too, can be brought out of the bondage of sin and into the promised land, the eternal life.
 


But look again at the narrative. There is symbolic meaning in the story, but there a more important, physical, literal concept here as well. This is the story of how God saved the Israelites, because they, as a nation held great meaning for all of us. As a nation it was crucial that they survived, so that the Messiah, promised centuries ago in the Garden of Eden, could be born, because from the descendants  of those very people in the desert, will come the One who will be the Saviour of the whole world.



All through the Old Testament we find Christ, both in symbol and in fact. The Story of Noah is a symbolic reference to salvation, but it also a story of how God physically kept a family alive, so that the Messiah can be born centuries later. We see this in God's promise to Abraham, that from his very loins will come the promised Messiah. Abraham was sent out, set apart for God's purpose and again it points both symbolically to you and me, as we are set apart for God, but it is also a physical necessity to choose the bloodline of Jesus Christ. We see it in the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery and landed in prison, unjustly, only to, later on, become the means of salvation for his own brothers, those who rejected him in the first place. Joseph is a type of Christ, meaning he points us to Christ, who had to suffer to save a world that rejected Him. But the story of Joseph is again also a story that tells us how God prepared in advance for a drought that He knew would be coming many years later. A drought that would have left the family from which the Messiah was to be born, perishing from hunger. God went to great lengths to ensure that the bloodline from which Jesus would be born, would stay alive. We see it in the story of  Rahab who saved the Israelite spies and was in turn saved by God when the walls of Jericho fell. She was saved because of the scarlet rope that hang from her window, as the blood of Christ saves us from sin. Literally, however, she was saved because she herself becomes a direct part of the bloodline of the Messiah. 



There are many such stories in the Old Testament. Add to that the fact that the prophets spoke of Jesus who will come and even the Psalms that sings about the Salvation. We must admit that all through the Old Testament Jesus is the centre of history. It is all about Him. The Old Testament is the story of, and preparation for, Redemption.



In the New Testament we find out how all the promises come together when Jesus is born to us, when God became man and came to live amongst us. The Gospel is about Jesus. How He was born so that the Scriptures could be fulfilled, how He lived a perfect life, and how He was tempted and withstood, how He, as the sinless man, died on the cross so that you and I can partake in His sinlessness as it is imputed to us, how He was raised from the dead so that you and I can have eternal life in the presence of a Holy God. It is not about anything you and I can do. It is about  what Christ has done for us.



In the above passage Jesus then goes on to point into the future when He declares that anyone who wants to live must eat of His Flesh and drink of His blood. This takes us to the last supper and from there into the future. The Christians in the New Testament took Communion, which is the eating of Christ's body and the drinking of His blood. They set the example and Paul made sure that every Christian realised the gravity of taking communion. Communion is not something to play with, it is not something to take lightly.  It is about having communion with the Lord of all Lords in remembrance of what He has done for us. We look back at the cross, in the way the Old Testament people looked forward to the cross. We have communion, reminding us that our sins are forgiven us because the Great and Almighty God of heaven and earth, became flesh, for our redemption. Every time we use communion we do so with every other Christian over the past 2000 years. The Church of the New Testament did this regularly, as did the Church before and after the reformation, as every Christian Church still do today. That outstretched arm of Christ pointed to every single one of us who  was still to come, who would be a part in the great Redemption drama that started in Genesis, in the beginning of History, and still continues to this day, with people still being redeemed. Christ Jesus surely is the centre figure in all of History.



If you would like to see the original Bible Study, go to

What is Relevance

We have to be relevant to be able to reach out to people. People live in a specific context. Every person in the world  is part of a nation, a culture and a community. Every person is part of a larger context. They live a real world with a real culture.

This is true, so now we have to be relevant to be able to make God more relevant to the people of a specific culture. Wow.

My question? How do we measure relevance? How do we decide what is the most relevant in the times we live in? What is the measure we use? Shall we look at the current culture? Ask yourself how does the current culture differ from the culture your mom and dad grew up in. Look at how their culture differed from the culture your grandparents grew up in. Do you think there is a difference? Looking at culture from this angle and  it becomes clear that human culture is perhaps one of the most fleeting constructs that exist.

Being relevant in our churches lead to such things as sermon series based on specific films or television series, or having a circus or other type of performance in church. People seem to think that relevance is preaching on specific 'current' issues, such as relationships, or parenting, or sex performance, rather that preaching Scripture.

I want to suggest that we may be using the wrong measure when we discuss relevance. Why should the peculiarities of a specific culture be more relevant than age-old truths. When we preach on a film or television series, are we very sure that everyone in the congregation knows this film or series, or are we preaching only to the part of the congregation that enjoys sci-fi, or romantic comedies, or reality TV?  Is that relevant?

We do not need to rescue the Gospel, as if it will disappear for ever if the present culture cannot find a connection with it. Over 2000 years the Gospel proved that it can survive martyrdom, complacency, wars etc. for 2000 years the Gospel has done quite well on it's own, without being relevant to a specific culture, but across cultures. Why is this the case? The truths contained in Scripture, both in the Old and the New Testaments, have proven to be relevant to people's situations, whatever culture or time, or nation they lived in. 

God is relevant! Always, in all circumstances. We need not tamper with Biblical texts, or sell ourselves to the culture to make this so. God is relevant, and His Revelation for us, as contained in the inspired Word of Scripture is relevant, and has been relevant for centuries. What makes us think that in out time we suddenly need to change the truth, as if that is even possible.

If we stick to the truth, as revealed to us, the Holy Spirit applies it in a relevant way, to address people's pain and suffering, to convict people and comfort them, to bring them into the loving embrace of Christ as they receive forgiveness. A Gospel that has proved effective for 2000 years, over time, countries, cultures, definitely does not need for us to apply it differently for our little moment in time and our little space in the universe, where the culture will just continue to change.

A tyrannical religion

I have listened to quite a few of the seeker-driven 'sermons'. I do not understand why it is supposed to draw seekers because this is the most tyrannical religion ever. It is not acceptable to confront people with their sin as this will drive people away. It is such a negative concept. So now we call it bad choices, imperfections, little mistakes and so forth. The problem though, as pointed out by different people, is that without preaching sin, one cannot preach the Grace of God. If sin doesn't really exist, what do we need grace for? What we have now is a religion based on principles from Scripture, where all the different stories are merely in the Bible to show us how to make our dreams come true, or not to miss the great dream God is dreaming for us. Looking at all the different Bible stories it is clear that there must all in all be about 687 principles identified by now by which one absolutely HAVE to live by to find and live God's dream for you. You REALLY don't want to miss THAT? Those principles are for dreams only. There is another multitude of principles, shown us clearly from examples in Scripture, of how to raise healthy children, how to save your marriage, find the best job ever etc. etc. etc. On top of that comes the imperatives that one have to live by to make yourself blessable (even my spellchecker knows that word doesn't exist). Making yourself blessable include financial principles. You surely want God to give you the blessings in store for you, all those blessing He cannot give you because He is incapable of doing anything if you don't open His hands. The point is that you end up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of principles that your life depends on. You have to do all this and don't think you can get out of it, because there is no real grace. Our Saviour has become merely another example from which we can get life principles. There is no grace, no salvation, nothing. Can you imagine the unbearable burden to keep all the different parts of your life in one piece. Is it not much more kind, loving and seeker sensitive to help people face their sins head-on and then share with them the infinite Grace of God, the fact that God gave His only Son, so that we can be forgiven.