Beckenham Baptist Church

Dear Friends,  At our recent church meeting we heard briefly about the Christian Aid campaign #RiseUpPayUp , which calls on the UK government to make polluters pay. Christian Aid tells us that at ‘the COP27 climate talks in 2022, governments agreed to create a fund to compensate communities hit by climate disasters. But the fund is still empty, and communities are still left to pay the bills for loss and damage. Meanwhile, the polluters who’ve created the crisis continue to grow rich’. Farming communities in southern Malawi are losing their livelihoods to droughts and floods. You may recall that we heard in Christian Aid Week earlier this year the story of Jen Bishop and her husband who began growing pigeon peas in 2016 but that now, because of erratic weather patterns, her financial stability is threatened. Heavy rains earlier this year from Cyclone Freddy caused Jen to lose part of a field which meant that she lost the equivalent of two bags of yield, worth at least £79, vit...

Dear Friends,  In my Life with Lucas daily Bible notes we are beginning a study on the Old Testament book of Jonah, described as a story that is a profound illustration of God’s mercy and grace. If you grew up in Sunday School then you will know that it is a tale about man and big fish and that Jonah receives a message from the Lord to go to Nineveh (modern day Mosul in Iraq) and preach against the city because its wickedness had come before the Lord. Instead of heading east to Nineveh, Jonah travels by boat in the opposite direction disobeying God’s call and heading to Tarshish in the southern part of Spain which was seen as being ‘the ends of the earth’. But God had other ideas and caused a storm to engulf the boat and to cut a short story even shorter Jonah was thrown overboard and swallowed up by a large fish in which he spent three days and nights contemplating his situation. Having prayed to the Lord and declared, ‘What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from t...

Dear Friends,  As a child growing up in Sunday School, I learned a song about not judging others. ‘Do not judge others and God will not judge you’, and it had a fantastically memorable chorus, ‘Speck, speck, speck, in your brother’s eye. Log, log, log in your own eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. Take the log out of your own eye, eye, to see the speck, speck, speck in your brother’s eye’. It is based on the words of Jesus that we find in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, ‘Do not judge others, or you too will be judged’ (Matthew 7:1), and which he gives a very amusing but deadly serious tale of someone looking at the speck of sawdust in someone’s eye but paying no attention to the plank of wood in their own eye. ‘Hypocrites’ Jesus says. Deal with the plank of wood in your own eye before you deal with the speck of dust in someone else’s eye. What does Jesus mean here? That as disciples of Christ we should be very careful before we even think about passing judgement on anyone else...

  Dear Friends,  Last Wednesday, 5 th July, marked 75 years of the National Health Service. The NHS England website states ‘treating over a million people a day in England, the NHS touches all of our lives. When it was founded in 1948, the NHS was the first universal health system to be available to all, free at the point of delivery. Today, nine in 10 people agree that healthcare should be free of charge, more than four in five agree that care should be available to everyone, and that the NHS makes them most proud to be British’. The NHS has been at the cutting edge of medicine and developments in health care including, ‘Britain’s first kidney transplant in 1960, Europe’s first liver transplant in 1968. The world’s first CT scan on a patient in 1971, and the world’s first test tube baby born in 1987’. It has been at the forefront in vaccination programmes protecting children from whopping cough, measles and tuberculosis, and in the use of robotic systems and innovative med...

Dear Friends,  ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God’ (Psalm 42:1). I wonder if you like to sing. A recent article in the Washington Post , pointed to the benefits that singing with others can have on our physical and mental health. In a study, Sing With Us , it found that singing in a choir reduced stress hormones and increased proteins that boosted the body’s ability to fight illness. It went on to say that ‘other studies have found a connection between singing generally with lessened anxiety, stimulated memory for those with dementia, increased lung capacity and an easing of postpartum depression’ ( Washington Post , 25/6/2023). In the book of Psalms we find numerous references to singing before God in worship, indeed the Psalms are ancient Israel’s hymnbook and in them are found joy and celebration, sorrow and sadness. Psalm 42 (and 43) present to us the theme of thirsting for God and hope in a time of discouragement. When we may feel lonely...

Dear Friends,  In my daily notes, Life with Lucas , we have been looking at the book of Proverbs over this last quarter beginning with the question, ‘how should we live?’ Jeff Lucas tells of an encounter with a taxi driver who ‘was lamenting some of the crazy ideas now commonly touted, and then he said, “The trouble is – we just think we’re so clever and sophisticated.”’ It is not hard, as we look around at the world today, to agree with this taxi driver’s wisdom is it. Just think about the varied ways in which people try to escape from the reality of life rather than face up to life’s struggles and problems. Alcohol, drugs, sex, power, fame and money are just some of the vices which can look tempting to begin with but actually only lead to more distress and misery. At the beginning of Proverbs we read, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline’ (Proverbs 1:7). My daily notes say, ‘When we take God out of the picture, there is no...

Dear Friends,  I’m sure like me you will have been amazed at the survival story of the four children who were found safe and well after spending 40 days in the Colombian jungle following a plane crash that killed their mother and two pilots. The BBC reported that ‘army radios crackled into life with the message the nation had been praying for: “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle.”’ The children, 13, nine, four and one, had fought against all the odds for six weeks and had endured the elements and often deadly terrain to survive and Colombia’s president called it ‘an example of total survival which will remain in history.’ In his book Soul Fuel , the adventurer Bear Grylls reminds us that struggles develop strength, and that Jesus never offers a trouble-free life. But what he does promise to all who follow is peace and confidence, help and rescue. When he promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples he said, ‘I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world w...