You have to love them!

Christian faith can be weak or strong, great or mustard small – God stays great!

Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. (Romans 14:3)

Someone who is despised is often described as ‘a waste of space’, as though they are of zero value and a mere nuisance to the rest of us; and if we “pass judgment” on them we are effectively placing them under condemnation. Paul counsels that those who consider themselves strong in faith are not to despise the weak as unbelieving, while those of weaker faith are not to label stronger believers as
irresponsible or reckless.

Both parties are in the wrong; both are endangering the unity of the body. Both are failing to take responsibility for each other’s welfare. Both are missing an opportunity to strengthen the spiritual family because “when each part is working properly, [this] makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” (Eph 4:16)

One of the great things about our Foundations family is that, for the most part, we are a community of believers whose faith is strong – that’s partly what formed our relationship in the first place. The God we gather to worship is very great – worldly measures are hopelessly inadequate to describe Him. His Word, is the unique, infallible, unchanging truth that has defied centuries of animosity and criticism and has a proven 100% reliability. This divine integrity and trustworthiness are deserving of our uncompromising trust. This all needs saying because we are living through a challenge to unity such as the true church has never faced – at least not in our lifetime.

Modern society – aided and abetted by the media (social media, newspapers, television, the internet etc.) absorbs information primarily by means of ‘narratives’ – heavily edited stories which are skewed to promote versions of reality which best support ideologies or political and commercial agendas. The skilled practitioners behind these narratives are ‘spin doctors’ and / or behavioural scientists whose personal skills excel in shaping the thinking of the masses (that’s the rest of us) to produce – or even to guarantee – certain types of behaviour. In short, if you want mass support for your ‘story’, you hire a spin doctor or a behavioural psychologist to advise on the best strategy that
will manipulate thinking and secure the response you want. It is critical to your success that the target group remains unaware of subtle influences from public broadcasting, news coverage, political statements or peer pressure. If the influence can be exerted through trusted channels – preferred newspapers, the BBC, websites, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc., and through authoritative channels – government, public health etc., you will be more confident that your narrative will be believed and will produce the crowd behaviour you hope to secure.

There are multiple ‘narratives’ at work in our godless society. The LGBTQ+ community promotes its particular narrative, Islam has another, Black Lives Matter still another. Feminism was making good progress until it collided with the interests of the Transgender lobby and ‘men’ identifying as female began to demand access to women’s domains – everything from the ladies’ toilet to the female Olympic weightlifting squad! All of these communities present themselves as ‘victims’ and anyone who disagrees with them is identified as the ‘oppressor’: ‘homophobes’, ‘infidels’, ‘white racists’, ‘men’ and ‘binaries’. One thing these ‘narrators’ will never tolerate is an alternate view of reality – nor will they permit alternate views a hearing. Their perceived ‘oppressors’ are shouted down on university campuses, excluded from student debates. Alternate views are either ridiculed and vilified in the media or their videos are removed from the internet.

It is not something we can ignore that this same ‘cancelling’ strategy has been used throughout the COVID pandemic to ensure that a one-sided narrative is relentlessly fed to the public mind. Respected professors, clinicians – even Nobel Prize-winners1 – have been ‘de-platformed’ because the scientific and medical views they hold do not conform to the authorised narrative via the World Health Organisation – which itself tracks to ‘economy with the truth’ in regard to pandemic reporting. 2 Surely it is self-evident that any view – including a government view – that expects to be treated with respect should not seek to silence or censor equally eminent but differing authorities? But this is what has happened – as if government were just another pressure group, determinedly silencing or ‘cancelling’ all contrary and unwelcome voices. This alone should give us cause to consider whether we are responding to reality or a carefully crafted version of it: “We heard about new cases, but never recoveries. Hospital admissions but not discharges were reported. We were given numbers of daily deaths, but largely without the context that about 1,600 people die every day in the UK anyway.”3

As a Christian family, we are not supposed to be known for our opinions (which will always divide us) but for our love for each other – which brings Jesus into the public view. Allowing for the reality that only God knows which of us is truly ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ in our faith (i.e. trust) our gatherings always demonstrate that we love each other. Those who distrust the government / media output and comply to the bare legal minimum required are not necessarily reckless – they are trying to put their faith where their mouth has been for decades. This is the testing time. No more armchair theories, but hard ‘rubber-on-the-road’ reality that pushes the boundaries of our trust in God. Literally millions of our brothers and sisters are practising their trust in God without their government’s approval. The little old lady during the wartime blitz who refused to go to the air raid shelter because “he who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps – and if he’s staying awake I’m going to bed” (!!) was not reckless, she was trusting her Maker. Likewise the folks who carefully test for Covid several times a week and observe to the letter every rule of law and treat ‘guidance’ with equal weight are not necessarily unbelievers. If they truly believe that social distancing is how you love your neighbour today… all credit to them. That said Charles Spurgeon loved his neighbours by
visiting the sick during frequent cholera outbreaks….! Paul looked death squarely in the eye and demanded “Where is your sting?” Does this describe us?

As we seek to build each other up, let’s be clear. Whether our faith is weak or strong has no bearing on the greatness of our God. Jesus has called us to be His disciples, not the world’s patients. “O magnify the Lord with me” – let the world magnify Covid!

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

Grace and peace in Our Lord Jesus,
David Andrew

1 https://tinyurl.com/wptronTalkR
2 https://tinyurl.com/whocu2017
3 Dodsworth, Laura. A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic
(p. 5). Pinter & Martin. Kindle Edition.