Seeing through the friendship fog

“I am 36 and I don’t have any friends” was the teaser title on the front page of the Times last week. “How do we tackle an epidemic of loneliness and foster a sense of belonging?” asked the Independent in May.  Britain has a Minister for loneliness, it isn’t alone in this, and has spent over £80 million trying to reduce it. The US Surgeon General released an official advisory identifying loneliness as an urgent public health threat with profound consequences for the world.

But if you’ve read your Bible none of that will surprise you.  In one sense it’s nothing new.  In Genesis 2 amidst all the “and it was good’s” of creation, Genesis 2 zooms in on the one “It is not good…”(18)  God looks and sees that “it is not good for the man to be alone.”  Made in the Triune God’s image Adam is made for relationship, for society not solitude.

Adam isn’t made to be independent, to go it alone.  And yet tragically we, warped by sin, see our need for friendship as a weakness, something to be overcome, an error we need to fix.  But Adam’s need for others was pre-fall.  It was part of the ‘good’ to need others it wasn’t a flaw – the flaw was that there was no friend, no helper suitable for him. God parades the animals in front of Adam for him to name and to realise that even man’s best friend wasn’t good enough.

Our need for friendship is part of the goodness and joy of being made in the image of God.  We can’t truly enjoy life in God’s world, even in Edenic perfection, without friends. Just let that resonate in your soul, let that challenge you, let it dispel the lies we’re tempted to believe.  We’re made for friendship.  With God yes, absolutely.  But also with others.

And so God creates Eve, and now the world is very good.  Not because at last a single man is married and marriage is the answer.  Marriage is a good gift but it alone isn’t the solution to aloneness.  Eve is God’s gift to Adam in two ways; one she is a companion for him, a helper suitable, and marriage is a good gift of God.  But secondly together they can now multiply and create a world of friendship.

Marriage is not designed to be the answer to our longing for friendship, your spouse should be your friend, yes absolutely, but they ought not to be your only friend.  Marriage is God’s gift to multiply friendship.

But the first casualty of the fall, of sin entering the world is friendship.  Friendship with God becomes fear of God and hiding from God and exile from God.  And friendship with one another becomes fractured with fear and vulnerability and blame.  We have the longing for friendship we had in the garden but now it comes with a fear that tells us to hide, not reveal, not commit and so on.

We’ve already mentioned the way that shows itself in our desire for independence, to not risk being hurt, the way we confuse strength with solitude. But secondly sin means we confuse loves.  What is the greatest love?

Our society says it is sexual love expressed in the act itself.  In fact who you’re attracted to defines your identity.  And it‘s always an ever present trip wire lurking in the background – you can’t be friends with someone of the opposite gender, or increasingly the same gender, because sex always gets in the way.

Tragically the church has imported that worldly way of thinking.  That shows in marriage being prized more than friendship.  In people trying to matchmake those who are single, or in throw away comments about meeting someone, or assumed expectations about life.  But whilst there is no marriage in the new creation and everyone is single friendship endures into eternity.  It’s shown in the confused way we think about friendship between men and women and increasingly with people of the same gender that fears them or objectifies them and keeps a distance from them.

But what does Jesus say the greatest love is in John 15?  His love is the greatest love, and it’s the same love his disciples are to have for one another.  It’s the word ‘agape’ and it describes God’s active love for his Son and his people, and his peoples active love for God and one another.  Agape is the greatest love, and the context in which we express that love is in friendship with one another.  Laying down our lives in order to bring others closer to God in Jesus.

We all install internet security on our computers to stop virus getting a hold and corrupting our operating system.  As you think about friendship this morning how has the world’s way of thinking about friendship, marriage, and the greatest love, corrupted your thinking and therefore the operating system you live out of?

What is there we need to repent of?  Maybe it’s putting too much weight on marriage?  Maybe it’s not loving others like this?  Maybe it’s in not pursuing friendships because we want to be strong independent individuals?  Maybe it’s not loving and pursuing friendship with those different from us?  Maybe it’s failing to bring others closer to God in Jesus in our friendships?

All of us fail.  All of us will be impacted by the failure of others, and the pain of befriending in a broken world.  All of us will have something to repent of and resolve to change as well as wounds we need to pour out to God.  But here’s the great news, we can because “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  And Jesus has done that for us, to forgive us our failures, but not to leave us wallowing in them so that as we know and experience and live in his love, we’re filled with that active and are transformed by the Spirit to love others like we’ve been loved.

Friendship: What is it?

How many friends do you have?  Just think about it for a minute, what’s your answer?  I guess it’ll depend on what your definition of a friend is.  Is it someone you have a vague connection or a friend in common with as FaceBook defines it?  Or maybe you’ve got various circles in your head working in from acquaintance to real friend with each concentric circle?  Maybe you define friendship by interest – so you have friends you play sport with, friends you work with, friends you share a hobby with?  Friends are someone you have something in common with, they’re like you.  Or is a friend someone who knows the real you, beyond the surface, they know your deepest darkest secrets?

Which is your working definition of friendship?  Our definition of friendship reveals a lot about us, our fear of others, what we think really matters.  And impacts how we live, whether we seek out friends or are a friend.

Let’s try another angle.  Answer this question: are you lonely; always, sometimes, or never?  Be honest.  Don’t hide behind a personality test or being an introvert, or being married or the fact you live with your family.  Are you lonely: always, sometimes, or never?

We live in a world that’s hurting.  Where there’s an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, not just out there but I think in the church too, because we’ve become confused about friendship – what it is, what it isn’t, who we can be friends with and who we can’t.  And that’s tragic because friendship runs as a theme throughout the Bible like the melodic line through a piece of music.

In this series we’re going to see what God, our loving creator and gracious faithful Father, has to say about friendship, and how sin has warped and twisted that so we are where we find ourselves, and how the gospel redeems friendship.

But let’s begin by defining friendship as we see it in John 15.

John camps out in Jesus final evening with his disciples from ch13-18.  In chapter 13 Jesus reframes the Passover meal in light of his imminent atoning death, washes his disciple’s feet, and reveals that they will abandon, betray and deny him.  Then, in the chapters that follow, he prepares them for life following him beyond their failure and forgiveness at the cross as he teaches them about the world’s hostility, the empowering of the Holy Spirit and his certain return and glorification.

It’s in the context of all this that in chapter 15 John calls on the disciples to abide in him.  To stay connected to him, dependent on him for life and spiritual vitality and fruitfulness.  He is the only way to be right with God, and so living connected to him is key.  Just as a branch withers and dies when cut off from the trunk, so disciples dry up, wither, and die without real living vital connection to Jesus.  Be connected to Jesus through his word so you know life and fruitfulness.  And that isn’t a chore for disciples because(9-11) we’re convinced of God’s love for us in Jesus, that obeying Jesus’s word, being connected to him is the way to true lasting joy!

But I wonder how you hear that?  What you think living connected to Jesus looks like?  We’re more shaped in how we read the Bible by our society that we realise, because we read it individualistically.  We read every ‘you’ in the Bible as being about ‘me, myself and I’.  We read John 15 as I must abide in Jesus.  I must be fruitful.  I must listen to Jesus words.  We reduce it to personal spiritual disciplines.

But (v12-17)as Jesus continues to teach what abiding in him looks like twice he commands them “love each other.”  Not as an optional extra but as a direct outworking of abiding in him and remaining in his love.  You can’t abide in Jesus and not love other disciples.

But what does loving each other look like?  (12-13)“love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  The cross is an act of cosmic friendship.  It’s the ultimate act of friendship because the cross changes everything – it changes our identity.  We become friends with God the Father and the Son, brought into a relationship of intimacy where God speaks to us, reveals his plans and character so we know him.

Friendship is laying down our lives to bring others closer to God in Jesus.  We can’t save someone, we can’t atone for their sin, but we are to follow Jesus’ example – to love others as he loved us.

That laying down of our lives is seen as we give up our time, preferences, resources for someone else.  It’s an act of friendship to go visit someone in need when we’re tired and don’t really feel like it.  To give up our comfort to risk to challenge or encourage in the truth.  To sing a song that isn’t our favourite because we know it’s someone else’s and encourages their soul.  Friendship is laying our lives down in a million and one ways that provide a tiny echo of Jesus unrepeatable laying down of his life for us as his friends.

And not just for those we like or who are like us, or who we naturally want to befriend.  The world does playground friendship – always looking out for someone who if we’re friends with them we benefit somehow in social status uplift, or a party invitation, or shared interest. We never really grow out of that, we walk into a room nd look for those who are like us, or who it’s good to be seen with, or who benefit our social standing.

But that isn’t Christlike friendship.  Look at(16), Jesus chose the disciples.  He chose them for salvation and appointed them to fruitfulness.  Jesus united people who would never have been friends in worldly terms through the radical reconciliation he won at the cross.  A tax collector, a zealot, a fishermen, a women Jesus had cast 7 demons out of, Joanna who left Herod’s court to follow Jesus.  Jesus chooses disparate people and calls them to love one another as he has loved them, to be friends not as the world defines it but as he makes possible through the cross and the empowering transformative power of the Spirit.

The church should be a place where anyone and everyone is welcomed.  Where we are on the look out for those on the margins and bring them into our established groups of friends.  Where we do what others love with them because we love them.

It’s how we show we’re Jesus friends(14), as we obey him and love others at cost to self.  Jesus isn’t being manipulative here, this isn’t emotional blackmail.  No, it is the natural consequence of knowing his love.

Maybe you need to repent of shrinking friendship down as you look at your friends.  Of disobeying Jesus command.  Of only loving those like you.  Or of only wanting friends on your terms when it suits your interests.  Or pray and speak to God about your loneliness and friendship and ask him to melt your heart again as you see the price God paid to make you his friend in Jesus.

We all ache for friendship.  But why is it so hard to find and it feels scary?  How come we both long for it and fear it?

Losing our J.O.Y

Things stay with us from when we’re young;, images, snippets of a song and so on. One of those for me is the line from a chorus we used to sing in Sunday School that explained Joy as Jesus first, Yourself last and Others in between. In fact there isn’t much more to the song now I’ve looked it up:

J-O-Y, J-O-Y

I know what it means

Jesus first,

Yourself last

and Others in between.

It’s not exactly award winning in terms of lyrical skill. But it has always stuck with me.

I wonder what your gut reaction to that short song is? Because in many ways it encapsulates the gospels transformative values when it comes to how we live. When we come to faith in Christ Jesus is not just our Saviour, he must be our Lord, so he comes first. He is the priority, he is the head whose lead we follow and who we live to please. Secondly as disciples of Jesus we live like Jesus, and that means we love others not just when it is convent but when it’s costly. We put others above ourselves, we love them at cost to ourselves, we serve them, we seek their good, we live like our Good Shepherd who lay his life down for the sheep.

Finally we put ourselves last. That sounds almost blasphemous today doesn’t it. In our individualised, therapeutic society ‘me’ is sacrosanct. ‘Me’ comes first. But the gospel is toxic to ‘me culture’ and ‘me culture’ is equally toxic to the gospel. We are not to hate ourselves, or put ourselves down; the gospel liberates us from guilt and self loathing, as much as it liberates us from being self involved and narcissistic, to be who we were created to be; made in the image of God and restored and redeemed in Christ to be like Christ and enjoy being sons of God together. The gospel radically reorients how we view ourselves, it frees us from the tyranny of pleasing others and society and liberates us to love others because we know we’ve been loved at immeasurable cost.

I get why that little chorus has gone out of fashion, but the truths it teaches must not go out of fashion in the church. We are saved by a serving saviour to be serving disciples. The spouse who dies to self to serve their spouse as they listen to them talk about their day even though they just want to shut them out and be by themselves. The parent who dies to self to serve their child by playing a game with them or reading the Bible at the end of a long day. The church member who calls someone, or picks someone up, or goes to prayer meeting even after a tiring day because they know it will encourage others.

Too often we individualise joy. Social isolation, having ‘me time’, is seen as what charges our batteries. We’ve been told we’re introverts and believe the lie that therefore we’re wired not to find joy in others but in isolation with me, myself and I. But the gospel rewires us so that our joy is found in serving others. Maybe that’s why we live in a culture where joy seems to always be unattainable because we’ve lost sight of that way we have been created and redeemed to find joy.

Our radical reworking of the lost sheep

Over the last century or so a force has arisen that has been so significant that it now holds us all in its grip and we’re largely unaware of it.  It is so hardwired into our brains that it’s the natural way we think and view everything, it even impacts how we read the bible, teach and apply the Bible.  That force is radical individualism and its legacies are legion.  But I just want to focus on the way this is playing out in the way we approach lost sheep – those who drift from church having professed faith but who would still maintain they are Christians. That spiritually they are fine because they read their bible and pray without being part of a church.

In Matthew 18v12-14 Jesus tells the well-known story of a shepherd who has 100 sheep but realises there are only 99 in the flock; one is missing.  This is where illustrators and storytellers and pastors have not helped us with what Jesus is teaching.   How do you picture the lost sheep?  He’s tangled in thorn bushes, wandering unawares towards a cliff, or oblivious to the wolves with glowering hungry yellow eyes and slathering jaws gathering in the woods in the background isn’t he?  But none of that is in the story – the sheep is just lost.  And that’s the point Jesus is making; it’s being lost that is the greatest peril.   The greatest danger is our lostness. 

Unlike in Luke where the focus of a similar story in a different context is used evangelistically to show God’s joy in the lost found, here in Matthew it’s used in the context of the church Christ inaugurates.  It is separation from the flock and the safety of the shepherd’s care that is the danger.  For believers there is danger in being separate from the flock, there doesn’t need to be any additional dangers, bring isolated from the church is enough of a danger that it ought to be sounding alarms.

But our individualism means that we don’t see isolation as a problem.  In fact the modern story teller influenced by decades of individualism may well tell a story of the heroic sheep, who decided they didn’t want to do what every one else was doing, they weren’t born to be in a flock with its constraints of other care and others preferences, they wanted to express themselves and throw off the shackles of conformity and community and be true to themselves.

As a strong independent sheep they didn’t need anyone else and so they heroically and courageously left the constraints of the flock and forged their own path.  Finally free to realise who they were and what it meant to be who they had always really been as they stood resplendently alone on the grassy hilltop in some final heroic shot as the screen fades to black as the music crescendos.

In an age of privatised, individualised life we have seen a warped deformed model of discipleship develop.  A discipleship that is disconnected from community, that is by its very nature independent and proud of it.  That trend which led people to drift away from regular committed church attendance, and from involvement midweek or in discipleship with others in church has been put on warp speed by lockdowns and COVID and live-streamed services.

I was at a meeting of local ministers recently where many shared how significant proportions of their churches have not returned post COVID.  There may well be a couple of things going on, God may be refining and purifying his church, those for whom church was a sop to cultural Christianity haven’t returned.  There may also be those who have become so germ-phobic that church feels like an impossibility (that will only be true if they apply the same logic to the Zumba class, family gatherings and so on). But there has definitely been an acceleration in the trend towards individualised discipleship.  Some people simply feel like they don’t need others, they are flock-less sheep, and there is a danger that as churches and church leaders we’ve fed this as we have taught God’s word unawares through the lens of individualism, through individualistic application of corporate passages, through underplaying the role of the church and discipleship that is corporate not privatised.

But that has profound consequences for how we live and how we relate to the bible.  The Bible’s call in the ‘one anothers’ is distinctly anti-individual, you can’t fulfil them alone.  In fact you can’t be a disciple alone!  You can’t apply the gospel alone!  You can’t fight sin, grow in grace, mature to be like Christ alone!  We need one another, we need a flock, we need shepherding care, we need others to confess our sin to, apply grace to us, and helps us apply the gospel in bearing with and being borne with.  To say we don’t is to say Christ was wrong; to say we don’t is to say we know ourselves better than the one who made us.  It is in short to rebel against God and to sin.

So how do we read the lost sheep?  How do we relate to those who drift?  How do we read God’s word and the world ourselves?  The danger is being apart from the flock, being outside the community of God, it is trying to follow Christ without being part of and plugged into the church he gave us as a necessity for discipleship.  For the disciple that is danger enough.  For pastors, elders, leaders, brothers and sisters, seeing a sheep isolated and alone, leaving the flock, ought to be danger enough.

What’s in a name? Injustice and the UK Church

They are just a couple of systemic things that allow us to disconnect our worship from justice.  There are others; the fear of being labelled ‘woke’ or ’anti-woke’, apathy, a sense of being overwhelmed by the problems and unsure of where to start which leads to paralysis and we could go on.  But I want to particularly suggest some areas where if Amos was addressed to us as the church in the UK we could be accused of injustice disconnected from our worship of God. The first couple are about spiritual injustice and then I’ll suggest some others:

A church that mirrors societies have’s and have nots. We all think we don’t have a lot in our personal budget.  That’s partly the result of advertising doing its thing; it’s partly a result of living in a capitalist, consumerist, individualistic society.  We are a society that never thinks we have enough even when we are the haves, because there is always a rapacious need for more.

That’ s not just true of us as people and families; it is true of the UK evangelical scene in terms of the church.  There are churches that ‘have’ and churches that ‘have not’ and unlike in the world of Acts where there is a constant sharing that doesn’t happen.  There is always more for our church budget to do to meet our needs and so we don’t think about the have not’s.

There are churches bucking this trend, whose worship and concern is kingdom focused, who generously give to fund workers in churches that could never afford the workers they need otherwise.  Who partner long term to fund ministry, pray for ministry, and send workers to support ministry in the areas of have not, because they don’t just sing of the gospel imperative to reach all people they get it.  We need to see this multiply.

A Church postcode lottery. We often hear of vast differences in education, waiting times, treatment availability and so on between postcodes but it’s equally true of your chances of hearing the gospel.  There are places you go to in the UK that are well served by evangelical bible teaching churches and there are places you won’t.  Those differences may be because of geography; the gospel divide between north and south, or within a town or city where you are more likely to have gospel churches serving middle class areas than deprived areas.

Can we sing our songs of worship to the God of all, who desires for all, and not see the pressing need to take the gospel to all?

Our nations greatest need is of the good news of Jesus Christ, so spiritual injustice matters.  But there are also lots of others areas where we might apply Amos to everyday life, everyday injustice in the UK, where we disconnect our worship from the everyday:

Trampling the poor (Amos 2v7).  How might we do that?  There are lots of ways in which that happens.  Trampling on the heads means riding over without seeing those you trample in the dust.  And so often we are so intent on our lives we just don’t see those trampled on.  In our desire (idolatry) of education we push for more and better, without acknowledging those families for whom that pushes them deeper into poverty, or exacerbates the widening access to education.

For example during lockdown online learning was easy if you had access to a tablet or laptop or ideally multiples of those.  But for some families they simply don’t have those things, and so there were children spending 5 hours a day trying to do school work, online learning, on mum or dad or brothers phone.  If there weren’t enough devices for one each that meant taking turns and stretching learning in shifts over the whole day.

That desire for online resources has continued post COVID with the proliferation of homework apps.  Requiring access some simply don’t have, widening gaps.  And even more so when it comes to those with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, ADHD, and so on.  We can trample the poor without even realising it.

Disconnected sexual ethics (Amos 2v7).  Israel are accused of injustice in their sexual ethics, father and son use the same girl profaning God’s altar.  Israel’s oppression and sexualisation of women was a justice issue that God identified.  It is not hard to see the same accusation being levelled against us in the UK as many access pornography regularly even in the church.  Such things ought not to be.

We ought to be different from society not going along with it.  The sexualisation of society with the advent of expressive individualism ought not to be tolerated or mirrored in the church.  How many women and girls have been oppressed not just in the porn industry, but in everyday life, in marriages, in society because of the way pornography has rewired brains in ungodly ways. This is a justice issue and we must not be complicit with it.

A lascivious love of luxury (Amos 4v1, 6v1-7).  Israel love luxury, their ivory couches, their rich foods, and their wine by the bowlful.  In fact Amos 6 sounds like something from a lifestyle magazine as a lifestyle to aspire to.  And yet all of it is built upon injustice (not paying workers fair wages, not paying for goods you use and so on).  In our society it is so easy to buy into those ideals, we do it naturally because it’s the air we breathe.

We want stuff so much so that it rivals God (Amos 8v5-6), worship gets in the way of business and profit and consumerism or entertainment or experience.

But God’s people ought to have had covenant priorities.  To claim to be God’s people was to claim to live like God – compassionate, gracious, a fatherless to the fatherless, one who cares for the foreigner and the fatherless.  Not one devoted to consuming and collecting but to compassion.

We can fall into the same trap.  We can claim to be God’s people but live just like the world. But Amos warns us God sees and God cares and god will judge, so we ought to repent, and be the people of God we claim to be

What’s in a name – isolationism and the loss of community

One of the other problems that surfaces in Amos is an ‘us and them’ mentality.  They are the people of God united by their redemption and rescue, they are one family, one community, one people, or they should be.  But they aren’t.  There is another disconnect.  And so one luxuriates whilst another is oppressed and enslaved to facilitate that luxury.  The rich pariah feeds like a parasite off the poor.

We need to recognise the same dynamic at play in our society.  We live life removed from one another and that makes loving our neighbour hard because we don’t know them well enough to know their needs or see the complexities of their situations.

Let me trace out some examples of how that works.  Our economic system means the biggest question we’re thinking about as we go shopping is ‘How cheaply can I get what I need/want in my basket/trolley?’  We don’t think about the welfare of those who produce our food.  We disconnect our thought of justice from our food bill.  We don’t think about the farmer under huge pressure to produce food as cheaply as possible, affected by storms and fuel prices, and hamstrung by red tape which is compounded by unjust trade deals with nations who don’t have to meet our standards.  We just want to fill our basket or trolley as cheaply as we can.

And so as we buy cheap milk, imported meat and vegetables we play our part in a cycle of injustice which refuses to pay the worker what he or she is worth; just wages.  What enables us to do that is the distance between us, the disconnected nature of our community, after all, ask yourself ‘how many farmers do you know?’.  We don’t stand in the supermarket and ask how can I love my neighbour who produced my food because we’re in the supermarket not face to face with our neighbour, isolationism perpetuates injustice.

Or think about modern slavery.  Both in the UK and abroad.  We simply don’t see those ensnared in such trafficking and we don’t stop to think about how what we purchase might feed into that cycle of entrenched poverty and human degradation. And yet in Amos enslavement of others is one of the things that God names again and again.

Apparently we have a limited capacity for compassion.  And so we struggle with large numbers.  We see disembodied, unperson-ed beings not people we ought to feel compassion for.  The disconnect across communities multiplies that and makes it possible for us to live unjust lives disconnected from worship.

What’s in a name? Systemic problems and false thinking

Because Israel seek their joy in stuff; their comfort and luxury not God they become like what they worship.  Wealth, comfort, consumerism, has no heart, no compassion, it’s not about providing for others it is about attaining for self.  We live in a society that is built upon that self same principle.  Radical individualism and consumerism is the default mode we’re indoctrinated with from the moment we see our very first advert.  We’re encouraged to make ourselves feel better by giving a fraction to charity but without seeing the faces of poverty or feeling compassion or them.

The UK church has a problem with the poor.  The tainted and flawed ideals of meritocracy and education mean we mistakenly believe you get what you deserve.  If you work hard, if you apply yourself, you can better your life.  We believe the tantalising lie of social mobility.  And all of those ideas harden our hearts to those in need and allow us to perpetuate injustice and oppression without any twinge in our conscience.

We hear or read stories of benefit cheats or the feckless unemployed without really understanding what lies behind those stories.  How those stories don’t reflect the reality of myriad lives, myriad stories, lived in poverty.  We allow ourselves to believe what we want to believe so that we can numb our consciences and continue to pursue comfort and luxury disconnected from our worship of God.

If you react to the above with the yes but I read about…  You’ve made my point.  If you read one story of one person, one family, you have read just that.  That is one story, one life, when there are millions of such stories each of which is different.  People ensnared in poverty because of a spouses infidelity and unjust divorce settlements.  People trapped in poverty and need by an education system that prizes only the academic and those who fit within it’s ‘sit and learn’ box.  Or paralysed by an economic system that has eradicated skilled manufacturing jobs, that has seen businesses incentivised to move location leaving swathes of the North as hotbeds of employment, and so on and so on.

The reasons for poverty are legion but it’s easier to believe a narrative that allows us to anaesthetise our conscience to the need with blame, so we can continue our pursuit of comfort without a twinge of conscience.  But the God of compassion sees and knows and his people ought to allow his word to open our eyes, set the agenda, and stir our compassion.

What’s in a name?

We’re coming to the end of a preaching series through Amos.  It’s not an easy prophecy to hear, but it seems particularly prescient to the UK church in some much of what God says.  Through Amos – a theologically untrained outsider from the Southern Kingdom sent to the Northern Kingdom – God confronts the people who trust in their status as God’s people, as proud descendants of Jacob, with how far short of that name they have fallen.

They claim to be the people of God but fail to worship as the people of God should instead mixing and mingling their Yahweh worship with idolatry and Baal worship.  Their worship is corrupted, and inevitably corrupt worship leads to corrupt living.  The people who proudly boast that they are God’s people, who think that gives them some kind of diplomatic immunity from judgement and exile, live not as God’s people.  And so they are warned as Amos pronounces judgement is coming on the people who claim the name People of God but live as anything but.

One of the themes that I found so fascinating in preparing and preaching this book is the connection between their corrupt worship and a society that spirals down into injustice.  As Israel drift from God’s gifted blueprint of right worship in all of life across the whole of society that drift leads to a decrease in devotion which results in a loss of ethics and justice and leads inevitably to oppression and injustice.

Israel claim to be God’s people but you wouldn’t see it if you observed their society, you would instead see rapacious consumerism and rampant injustice.  If an archaeologist excavated Israel years after their exile what would they find, what were the treasures of their society?  Luxury goods and comfort(3v12).  Israel have become like every other society around them.  And that desire, that devotion to comfort not God, leads them to pursue comfort and profit and luxury at the expense of the weak and vulnerable and poor.

Worship of God minimised and compromised leads to a loss of joy in God which leads to a seeking of joy in other things – in this case comfort and wealth – which leads to devotion to attaining that joy at the expense of others.  Which leads to injustice and oppression and to the people of God looking like anything but a people in the image of the God of compassion, of the fatherless and the oppressed.

As we’ve worked through this book I think it has much to challenge us on in the church in the UK especially when it comes to the disconnect between who we claim to be and who we live as in particular in this area of justice and the poor.  I’ll be posting a few thoughts about specific areas where that’s a potential issue in the coming days.