The Mercy Tree

‘So completely was Jesus bent upon saving sinners by the sacrifice of Himself, He created the tree upon which He was to die and nurtured from infancy the men who were to nail Him to the accursed tree.’  

Octavius Winslow

One of my work colleagues, lets call her Sarah, recently asked my team the question 'what effect does mercy have on your life?'  For some reason the question really impacted me and I was lost for words (hard to imagine but true).  Part of the reason was that I had just finished a series on 'Christ's sayings from the cross' where I had talked a lot about mercy.  It is one thing to talk about mercy but it is something else to practice it. If you are a Christian you have probably heard dozens of sermons on the mercy of God, you've probably talked about it hundreds of times, but does mercy have any impact on the way you live your life?  Take a moment to think about it.

Christ's sayings from the cross are a rich study for the Christian.  They are scattered across the four gospels who record different aspects of Christ's sufferings.  Christ's path to the cross was marked by mercy.  Even as he went to Golgotha Christ turned to the 'Daughters of Jerusalem' in Luke 23 v 26-31 and pleaded with them not to weep for Him but for themselves and their children.  Christ quotes from Hosea 10 v 8 as he prophesies about how awful the coming judgement will be.  As Leon Morris notes 'Christ wanted their repentance not their sympathy.'  Christ saw the awful siege that was coming on Jerusalem in AD 70 and was seeking to warn them to prepare for that awful day by fleeing to Christ.  Christ quotes a curious proverb about green and dry wood (Luke 23 v 31).  What does it mean?  John Macarthur captures it well in in his commentary: ‘If the Romans would perpetrate such atrocities on Jesus (the green wood – young, strong and a source of life) what would they do to a Jewish nation (the dry wood – old, barren and ripe for judgement).’ 

As Christ is finally being nailed to the cross he utters these remarkable words 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do (Luke 23 v 34).  At the forefront of Christ's mind is mercy even as he is surrounded by his enemies (as predicted in Psalm 22 v 12-21).  Golgotha was certainly a place of death and destruction but Jesus made it a place of deliverance and mercy.  

At the cross, Christ was becoming the 'sin offering' which was offered 'outside the camp' (see Ex 29 v 14, 33 v 7, Le 4 v 12, 21, 6 v 11, 13 v 46).  This is captured well by the writer to the Hebrews; 'For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured' ch 13 v 11-13.  Golgotha was full of symbolism.  So many prophesies were being fulfilled.  All the types and shadows of the Old Testament were all coming to their completion at the cross.  

What was it all for?  It was the ultimate display of mercy and love that this world has ever seen.  As JC Ryle says 'as soon as the blood of the Great Sacrifice began to flow, the Great High Priest began to intercede.' Christ was pleading with His father to forgive his murderers even as they were in the act of killing him.  This word forgive is literally 'to leave'.  Christ was saying to His father not to judge them immediately but to give time for mercy.  Christ's prayers were answered within a few hours with the centurion in Matthew 27 v 54 saying 'Truly this man was the Son of God.'  Let's never despair over mercy when a hardened centurion can go from driving nails into the Saviours hands to being his disciple in around 6 hours!

Sin demands justice yet sinners need forgiveness.  How can they be reconciled?  At the cross.  Only at the cross can it be said that ‘Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ Psalm 85 v 10.  None of us deserve mercy, but Christ has made a way of salvation.‘But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.  He is the propitiation for our sins, and not our only but also for the whole world’ 1 John 2 v 1-2.  Dr Thomas Guthrie said of these words 'The whole world' - 'ah!' some would say, 'that is dangerous language.' It is God's language: John speaking as he was moved by the Holy Ghost. It throws a zone of mercy around the world. Perish the hand that would narrow it by a hair's breadth!'  Propitiation means that Christ's sacrifice satisfied God's wrath on the cross.  The Old Testament word for atonement is the same word used in Genesis 6 v 16 for Noah covering the ark in pitch.  Christ is covering His people at the cross.  As one writer says 'Christ not only provides, but is, the 'atonement cover' which obscures our sins from the sight of God, expiating our guilt by his blood.'

So what difference does mercy make in my life?  Well hopefully it humbles me.  As I look a the mercy tree of the cross I see the terribleness of my sin but also the greatness of my Saviour. I hope it also makes me merciful.  I wonder if I asked my family, friends and work mates if they find me merciful, what would they say?  Isn't that the ultimate test of our Christianity?  Is it seen in our everyday lives?  If I claim to have been forgiven and freed from a life of sin, how can I do anything else but show that mercy to others.  Lastly I hope that mercy helps me to see that if Christ has given me everything nothing is too much to ask in His service.  Christ doesn't call us to comfortable Christianity, he calls us to radical, sacrificial service.  Mercy is a wonderful subject but it is even more beautiful as it is lived out day by day.  

Oh on that cross, how it was seen
I can go now ever trusting in the One who died for me
What could I bring, for Your gift is complete
So I trust You, simply trust You, Lord with every part of me

Jesus, only Jesus
Help me trust You more and more
Jesus, only Jesus
May my heart be ever Yours
Jesus, only Jesus
Help me trust You more and more
Jesus, only Jesus

May my heart be ever Yours

CityAlight

What can we Learn from Dr Guthrie?

Over the last few months in The Record we have looked at different aspects of Dr Guthrie’s incredible ministry: his preaching, his pastoral work, his work as a social reformer, his pioneering work as a church planter and his role as the 'Apostle of Temperance'.  

His legacy is awe inspiring and very humbling.  The key question is what can we learn from Dr Guthrie and apply in our own situation today?

1.  Vision - Dr Guthrie had incredible vision.  He literally, by God's grace, changed Scotland.  His vision was not shaped by the challenges of 19th Century Scotland but rather shaped by the greatness of the God he served.  He believed that the Christian gospel could save anyone and transform any community.  By the time of his death Guthrie had, along with many other social reformers, changed childhood.  Rather than being seen as commodities, towards the end of the 19th Century, children were seen as those in need of protection and nurture.  Partly as a result of lobbying from social reformers like Guthrie legislation was passed protecting children from working long hours in often dangerous situations.  The DNA of men like Thomas Guthrie and Thomas Chalmers is that they had a big vision.  It wasn't a congregational vision or even a Free Church vision but a national vision.  Surely Guthrie teaches us that our current vision for Scotland is too small and parochial.   

2. Truth - We need to know what we believe.  Unlike so many Christians who get involved in social action, Guthrie never lost his Biblical moorings when he became a social reformer.  It is clear from his writings that he adhered to the Bible as the word of God and remained confessionally Reformed throughout his ministry.  He believed in the supremacy and centrality of preaching as the main method that God uses to save sinners.  Guthrie preached the whole counsel of God with love and tenderness but never compromised on doctrine.  Are we as a church falling out of love with the reformed theology that compelled men like Guthrie and Chalmers?  Are we embarrassed by our reformed heritage?

3. Love - As a minister of the Gospel, Guthrie embodied love.  We are told in James 1 v 27:  Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  The fruit of true Christianity is always love for the poor and the oppressed.  Many people regard practical love for the poor as a deviation from the gospel.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Guthrie's work with ragged children enhanced his message and gave his Christianity a reality and authenticity that made the gospel attractive to sinners.  We must never love people just because they may become Christian’s or come to our church.  We must love them because they are made in the image of God and the gospel commands us to love our neighbour.  The very essence of grace is to love with no strings attached.  How are we loving those on the margins of society like Dr Guthrie?  Are our churches places where people with addictions, relationship difficulties, prisoners, women experiencing domestic violence will find grace and love? Do we want these kind of people in our churches?  If we do, how will we support them and disciple them?

4. Hope - It was this combination of truth and love that gave Guthrie such hope for the communities he worked in and for the individuals he sought to reach.  The gospel, when preached in all its fullness and freeness, should fill every sinner with a sense of hope that Christ died to reconcile them to a holy God.  The church has gone though many periods when this message has been lost or when she has lost confidence in the power of this gospel to reach the darkest and most hopeless parts of our communities.  Guthrie (among others) gave the Free Church the belief that the gospel, accompanied by education for the poor and the practical outworking of love through the local church could redeem the darkest and most hopeless communities. Do we still have this hope?

There is a famous story about Dr Guthrie and Thomas Chalmers standing on George IV Bridge looking down on to the Cowgate.  Guthrie tells us; ‘Hopeful of success, he [Chalmers] surveyed the scene beneath us, and his eye, which often wore a dreamy stare, kindled at the prospect of seeing that wilderness become an Eden, these foul haunts of darkness, drunkenness and disease, changed into "dwellings of the righteous where is heard the voice of melody."  Contemplating the scene for a little in silence, all at once, with his broad Luther-like face glowing with enthusiasm, he waved his arm to exclaim, "A beautiful field, sir; a very fine field of operation” (Out of Harness, Thomas Guthrie).  

It takes great vision to look at some parts of Scotland and see them as a ‘beautiful field’ but yet that is what men like Dr Guthrie saw in places like the Cowgate. Thomas Guthrie brought hope to thousands through his preaching, his pastoral care and his practical Christianity.  Nobody was beyond redemption for Guthrie.  He preached a gospel that was free for the worst sinner and believed that nobody was a hopeless case.  He is an inspiration to us, that in dark and difficult days, the gospel can once again reach the darkest corners of Scotland. 

Dr Thomas Guthrie on Wisely Considering the Case of the Poor

William Carey, the great missionary, when leaving for India in 1793 said 'I'll go down into the pit, if you will hold the rope.'   When Dr Thomas Guthrie was called to Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh in 1837 from his country charge of Arbirlot he said something similar when comparing the difference between his two charges; 'I can compare it to nothing else than the change from green fields and woods and the light of nature to venturing into the darkness and blackness of a coal pit.'

Throughout his whole ministry Guthrie took a great interest in the poor of his parish - primarily, although not exclusively, in the overcrowded Cowgate.  Even before arriving in Edinburgh Guthrie believed a minister should live amongst his people; 'Now, I should like a clergyman never to step out of his own door but he steps in amongst his people.  I would have him planted in the very centre of his population' (letter to Mr Dunlop in 1837).  Initially Guthrie lived in Argyll Square and then in Brown Square which would have both been where today's Chamber Street is as can be seen from this old map.  It is hard to imagine the squalor and poverty that Guthrie saw on a daily basis as he visited his parish.  He recounts his early days; 'I can never forget, nothing can efface the impression made on my mind, when I first lifted the veil from the hideous veil of starvation and sin that lay before me. The scenes that I was called on to witness the first three or four days of my parochial visitations almost drove sleep from my pillow.  They haunted me like very sceptres, and, after visiting till my heart was very sick, I have come up from the College Wynd with the idea that I might as well have gone to be a missionary among the Hindoos on the banks of the Ganges.'

Dr Guthrie was no ivory tower minister.  He was the embodiment of salt pressed against the decaying flesh of the world around him.  This came at a heavy price with Guthrie's future health problems.  He became a magnet for his parishioners seeking temporal and spiritual help on a daily basis; 'My door used to be besieged every day by crowds of half-naked creatures, men, women, and children, shivering with cold and hunger; and I visited many a house that winter, where there was a starving mother and starving children, and neither bed, bread nor Bible - till, with climbing stairs my limbs were like to fail, and with spectacles of misery, my heart was like to break.'So how did Guthrie respond to all the challenges around him?

His starting point was that man is made in the image of God.  The half naked child sleeping on the streets of Edinburgh was, to Guthrie, as precious in the sight of God as the Queen on the throne. In his first plea for Ragged Schools in 1847 he compared what some regarded as 'rubbish' as shining jewels; 'Yes it is easy to push aside the poor boy in the street, with a harsh and unfeeling refusal, saying to your neighbour, "These are the pests of the city."  Call them, if you choose, the rubbish of society; only let us say, that there are jewels among that rubbish, which would richly repay the expense of searching.  Bedded in their dark and dismal abodes, precious stones lie there, which only wait to be dug out and polished, to shine, first on earth, and hereafter and forever in a redeemers crown.'  Our response to poverty will depend on our starting point.  If we see people with honour and dignity, made in the image of God, our response will be full of compassion and we will seek to go the extra mile.  If we see people as economic units as George Osborne does, our response will be very different.

Secondly, Guthrie took sin seriously.  He was no socialist.  He knew that little is achieved by the mass and indiscriminate distribution of money or food.  Sinful nature often makes a bad situation worse as Guthrie found on his many pastoral visits.  Poor families with little we're ravaged further my a drunken or profligate parent.  This was the time of the 'dram houses' and 'gin palaces'. Indiscriminate (however well meaning) compassion often compounds problems rather than solving them. If you need any evidence of this just look at Africa and the billions spent my Western aid agencies with little long lasting effect.  For more on this read 'When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself' by Corbett and Fikkert.  In believing in original sin as the source of society's problems, Guthrie responded, as we shall see next, in a gospel centred way.

Thirdly, Guthrie believed in the 'almost omnipotent power of Christian kindness'.  Our response to poverty needs to be gospel centred.  Guthrie knew that compassion without the power of the gospel would change little.  Only the grace of God can truly change the human heart.  We get a flavour of Guthrie's view of poverty in his great work 'Seed Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools' (published 1847, 1849 and 1860).  Having outlined the plight of thousands of 'ragged children' on the streets of Edinburgh he famously said 'These Arabs of the city are as wild of those of the desert, and must be broken into three habits, - those of discipline, learning, and industry, not to speak of cleanliness.  To accomplish this, our trust is in the almost omnipotent power of Christian kindness.  Harsh words and harder blows are thrown away here.'  The ragged school model sought to work with families by offering the children a comprehensive system of education, food and industrial training during the day while encouraging the children to return home in the evening.  The aim of the ragged school was to teach young people how to survive and thrive.  Unlike today's welfare state it did not crush people under the weight of a faceless and unresponsive bureaucracy.  Christian compassion needs to be personal, genuine and it needs to go 'above and beyond'.

Fourthly, Guthrie's response went to the root of the problem.  His response to poverty was what might be termed today 'tough love'.  He sought to restore self respect, hard work and sobriety.  While he had all the time in the world for the innocent victims of drunkenness and poverty he was very outspoken against those who perpetuated their poverty through vice.  He had no time for encouraging laziness or indolence through well meaning compassion; 'The money which is lavished on sturdy beggars, on the wasteful slaves of vice, on the reckless and improvident, you have no right to expect repayment of.  These are not the poor.  On the contrary they plunder the poor, and prey on poverty; and hardening men's hearts by their frauds, improvidence, crimes and detected impostures, against the claims of real poverty, they deserve not charity but chastisement.  It is a scandal and a shame that such devouring locusts are permitted to infest our city and swarm in its streets.  These vices of a system which the police stangely tolerate, and our charity unwisely maintains, are visible in the botched and brazened features of those thriving solicitors.  The very breath with which they whine for charity smells of the dram shop.  It poisons and pollutes the air; and those who contribute to foster this profligate system have no claim to the blessing.'  The Victorians often receive a bad press for their view of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor but how can it be compassion to prop up a man or woman's vice while their children starve?   Welfare must always be a hand up not a hand out.  This is surely the principle of 2 Thess 3 v 10.  If a man is able to work, and work is available, our whole system of welfare should be focussed on helping him work.

Finally, Guthrie wasn't interested in 'harm minimisation' or 'risk management'.  His focus was on transformation. This final quote perhaps best sums up Guthrie's views.  It encourages us to have a 'wise' response to the poor.  

'Blessed is he that wisely doth

The poor man's case consider'

'So run the opening words of the 41st Psalm, in the Scottish Psalter.  Wisely?  He wisely considers the case of the poor who, wherever it is possible, supplies them with work rather than money; who helps them to help themselves, who encourages them to self-exertion, and teaches them self respect; who patronises not indolence but industry, not the intemperate but the sober; who applies his money to relieve the misfortunes that come from the hand of Providence, rather than such as are the divinely ordained and salutary penalties of vice.  And who thus goes to the work of Christian benevolence will meet with many cases to cheer him on, and keep him up to this mark, "Be not weary in well-doing."

This is the challenge for the church today.  As Bryant Myers says in his book Walking with the Poor; 'Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.  Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.'  Poverty is not just about money.  It is about lacking the networks and relationships that can lift us up when we fall.  This is where the church needs to be - to go beyond relief and an emergency response to poverty and walk with the poor in the long and often hard journey of discipleship.  What our broken, fractured communities need more than anything is the bread of life, the Lord Jesus Christ. Christian compassion so often compounds the plight of the poor rather than offering a helping hand to a new and better life.  In the Psalmists (and Guthrie's) words we do not 'wisely' consider the poor. Compassion that compounds and excuses sin is not biblical compassion.  We need to feed the hungry but also present Jesus in all his beauty and majesty.