This Sunday is the second Sunday of Advent and we’re lighting the candle of “Peace.” The Vankevich family will light the Advent wreath this week. This year our Advent preaching series is entitled “Advent Hope” and the Rev. John Chu will be our preacher. Rev. John is preaching from the Gospel of Luke and his sermon is entitled “Advent Hope: Jesus, Our Consolation And Redemption.”
So come, join us as we worship the triune God together. Here’s the announcement:
Church @ Church this Sunday—the 7th December at 10:00am
In case you missed it, you can find last week’s service (First Sunday of Advent)HERE.
Important Details:
This Sunday 7th December after the service is our annual Christmas Party lunch. So plan to join us. (Remember that we have no heating or cooling facilities until our repairs are complete.) Everyone is welcome.
Ladies’ Refresh Prayer 10:30am next Tuesday. All ladies welcome.
Weekly Men’s Fellowship. An informal gathering for men. 9:30am Wednesdays at Bean-Around-The-Word coffee shop, White Rock (corner of Johnston Road and Thrift Avenue White Rock). Contact Mike Inch for details. All men welcome.
All Saints Prayer and Bible Study 7:00pm every Thursday. Cathie Bolan will lead us in our study of the Apostle John’s first Epistle. Everyone welcome
The Advent Series for this year is entitled: “Advent Hope. ” Each week we will have a guest preacher.
Sunday 21st December: “9 Lessons and Carols” Please stay for hot apple juice and mince pies after the service. Everyone welcome.
Christmas Eve 24th December Family Candlelight service at 7:00pm. Everyone welcome.
Christmas Day 25th December Family Service at 10:00am. Everyone welcome.
If you have any further questions, or need help in any way, don’t hesitate to contact me.
See you this Sunday.
Thank you Church.
Stay vigilant and prayerful.
Love each other deeply and keep Jesus at the very centre of everything you do.
Why do we light five candles at Advent? It is about Jesus the Light of the world who breaks into our darkness. God’s first action in Genesis 1:3 was to say: “Let there be light. 1 John 1:5 says: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”. In John 8:12 and 9:5, Jesus said: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” That’s what Advent is all about.
Despite what Carl Jung suggested, God does have not a dark side, ala Luke Skywalker in Star War. John 1:5 reminds us that “Jesus the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Isaiah 66, being the last chapter, is very similar to the last book of Revelation. Many people are not aware how eschatological and apocalyptic that Advent really is. Advent is not just about remembering Jesus first coming in a manger, but also preparing for his second coming. Both Advents are about light breaking into our darkness. As Isaiah 9:2 puts it, “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.” Isaiah 60:1-2 says: “Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you, even in the midst of gross darkness. Have you noticed that the darkness these days is getting much grosser?
2 Corinthians 11:14 says that Satan comes as an angel of light offering counterfeit enlightenment. Jesus brings the true enlightenment in a very dark and lost world. As Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6 tell us, Jesus the Jewish messiah is also the Light to all the Gentile Nations. You don’t need to do yoga to get Jesus’ enlightenment. What you need to do, as Bishop Peter often reminds us, is to surrender our wills.
My late mother Lorna, who used to sit in this second pew, suffered during the winter from SADS, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Is anyone else affected by the lack of sunlight in the winter? Mom was drawn to the Light in the midst of darkness. That is why we flew as a family to Hawaii in December 1971, right before my Jesus movement conversion. Hawaii was indeed a Paradise of Amazing light. The only problem is that I brought my personal darkness with me. When I was born again in a day, I was filled with heavenly light that has never left me in the past 53 years. One Day at a Time. Jesus in Matthew 5:14 calls us the Light of the World. In John 12:36, Jesus said: “Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.” Paul in Ephesians 5:8-9 and 1 Thessalonians 5:5 similarly calls us Children of Light.
One thing that brightened up my mother during the winter was looking at vibrant, colourful paintings. My mother was an amateur painter who took lessons from Bob Hickling, whose arms were paralyzed from polio so he painted with his mouth. My mom loved not only Van Gogh but also Monet, the French father of Impressionism which focused on light, form, and nature. Monet did not use chiaroscuro like Rembrandt, who painted sharp almost three-dimensional contrasts between light and dark. Instead, Monet used extra colour to create effects of light, shadow and depth, giving momentary impressions (hence impressionism). Monet painted the impression of brilliant light by putting contrasting vibrant colors, such as blue and orange, right next to each other. Instead of creating shadows with dark paint, he would create blue and green shadows through which light broke through.
My mother’s love for paintings is now rubbing off on me at age 71. How many of you have or had parents who loved paintings? How many of you have picked up your parent’s love of paintings? How many of you love to actually paint? Both Monet & Van Gogh loved painting sunflowers. (Show painting) His revolutionary method of painting in the outdoors was called plein air. Monet famously said, “To see, we must forget the name of the things we are looking at.”
Some see Monet as the world’s most famous painter. Has any one been to seen Monet’s famous Japanese-inspired garden and pond in Giverny, France? It’s visited by over one half million people annually. Born in 1840, Claude Monet was passionate about light in his flower paintings. In the early 1890s, he painted Rouen Cathedral first in morning light, then midday light, and then gray weather, showing his deep fascination with the effects of light. What however would light be without colour? Monet said: • Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
Monet struggled with depression, poverty, illness, and discouragement. He became so despondent over his lack of sales that in 1868, he attempted suicide by trying to drown himself in the Seine River. Troubled by cataracts, Monet sometimes was so frustrated with his paintings that he destroyed as many as 500 of his own 2500 paintings. He would burn, cut or kick them into oblivion, ripping them to shreds.He once wrote that “age has worn me out. My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.”
Yet, one of his paintings has since sold for 110 million dollars.
Hitler as a failed painter stole many of Monet’s paintings from Jewish art collectors. In October 2024, after 86 years, the FBI returned Monet’s Bord de Mer painting to the granddaughters of a Jewish couple who fled Vienna in 1938. His fellow impressionists Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne were all antisemitic. Claude Monet however rejected French antisemitism by supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer unjustly accused of treason and imprisoned.
That is why the nation of Israel loves Monet. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem houses several of his paintings. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art holds Monet’s Water Lily Pond. There are around 130,000 painters in Israel. The most famous Israeli painter was Marc Chagall.
Monet had a God-given ability to see light and colour, helping others to see God’s creation in a whole new way. Similarly, through Advent, Jesus removed our spiritual cataracts so that we can see with Kingdom eyes spiritual light and colour, helping others to see God’s new creation in a whole new way. As Hank Williams sang, ‘I saw the Light. I saw the Light. No more in darkness. No more in night.’ That is what Advent is all about.
In Isaiah 66 1, the Lord says:
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?
God is the Father of lights. As James 1:17 puts it, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” The house that God dwells in is full of unimaginable heavenly light. Do I hear an Amen?
2 Has not my hand made all these things,
and so they came into being?”
declares the Lord.
“These are the ones I look on with favor:
those who are humble and contrite in spirit,
and who tremble at my word.
Vs 2 tells us that in order to dwell in God’s heavenly house, we need to humble ourselves with contrition and tremble at His Word? How many of you tremble at God’s Word? It is so easy to become blasé and distracted. God wants us to repent of all lukewarmness to His Word and recover our first love for Jesus and the Bible.
3 But whoever sacrifices a bull
is like one who kills a person,
and whoever offers a lamb
is like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever makes a grain offering
is like one who presents pig’s blood,
and whoever burns memorial incense
is like one who worships an idol.
They have chosen their own ways,
and they delight in their abominations;
Vs 2 & 3 tells us that choosing our own ways, delighting in abominations, it never ends well. As E Stanley Jones said in his book The Way, there are essentially two choices in life: God’s way or not the way. Not the way, doing it our own way, always ends in darkness. Idolatry is all about choosing the darkness. Revival is about choosing to turn from darkness back to the true Advent Light, Jesus.
4 so I also will choose harsh treatment for them
and will bring on them what they dread.
For when I called, no one answered,
when I spoke, no one listened.
They did evil in my sight
and chose what displeases me.”
Revival is about realizing that our way doesn’t work. Vs. 4 tells us that idols don’t answer or listen when we call. Doing what displeases Jesus is always a lose-lose. IF we want Advent revival, we must choose what pleases Jesus, the Light of the World.
5 Hear the word of the Lord,
you who tremble at his word:
“Your own people who hate you,
and exclude you because of my name, have said,
‘Let the Lord be glorified,
that we may see your joy!’
Yet they will be put to shame.
Vs 5 reminds us that when you choose the Advent Light, not everyone will be happy about this. They may hate you and exclude you because of your love for Jesus the Light of Advent.
6 Hear that uproar from the city,
hear that noise from the temple!
It is the sound of the Lord
repaying his enemies all they deserve.
Vs. 6 tells us that there is no escaping the sound of Light that God releases into our life. We reap as we sow. As the Creeds remind us, Jesus the Lord of Advent Light will indeed return to judge the living and the dead.
7 “Before she goes into labor,
she gives birth;
before the pains come upon her,
she delivers a son.
Vs. 7 teaches that breakthrough always require labour pains. Advent is a season of labour pains, as we are preparing for the Light of the Christ Child. How many of you as mothers had a completely pain-free delivery? How many mothers have ever suffered or worried about your children post-birth? How old does one’s children need to before you stop being tempted to worry about them? Let me ask you: What is God trying to birth in your life, your family, your work? What is God birthing right now in Israel and secondarily in our nation of Canada?
October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, has changed Israel forever. The electric fence failed them. Many Israelis are turning to the Lord in a way that they never did before. Has anyone noticed that technology, no matter how impressive, is not our saviour. It will let us down.
Vs 8 says: Who has ever heard of such things?
Who has ever seen things like this?
Can a country be born in a day
or a nation be brought forth in a moment?
Yet no sooner is Zion in labor
than she gives birth to her children.
Advent represents desert and waiting times for the Light of Christ. Israel, since 1948, has turned a barren desert into one of the greatest fruit-exporting country on earth, just like the Old Testament prophesied. They export over 800 million dollars of fruit per year, especially dates, figs, pineapples, avocados, oranges, and mangoes. They have also planted 250 million trees throughout Israel.
God has kept his covenant promises to the ancient Jewish people. Isaiah 11: 12 says, “He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; He will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.”
In Ezekiel 11:17, “the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’”
Prophetically speaking, the rebirth of the Nation of Israel on May 14th 1948 is “The Time Clock of the Nations.” Many are realizing that this single miracle of Israel, “born in one day,” is the biggest and most prominent sign of the coming return of the Messiah to Jerusalem!
British Bible teacher Lance Lambert says: “No other nation in the history of mankind has twice been uprooted from its land, scattered to the ends of the earth and then brought back again to that same territory. Israel has twice lost its statehood and its national sovereignty, twice had its capital destroyed, its towns and cities razed to the ground, its people deported and dispersed, and then twice had it all restored again. No other nation or ethnic group has been scattered to the four corners of the earth, and yet survived as an easily identifiable and recognizable group.” This is a miracle.
The first exile took place under Babylonian rule in 587 BC. As for the second great exile, Roman forces serving under the Roman commander Titus destroyed and dismantled Jerusalem in August AD 70, exactly as Jesus had prophesied 37 years earlier. The Romans killed 600,000 Jewish residents and deported 300,000 more to locations scattered around the Empire. Sixty-five years later in 135 AD, the forces of Roman Emperor Hadrian crushed the last Jewish uprising, led by Bar Kokhba at Masada.
Hadrian’s hatred for the Jews burned so brightly that he changed Jerusalem’s name to his own name and declared it “a Roman city forever which no Jew could enter under pain of death.” He built a temple to Jupiter on the site of the former Jewish Temple. Then he renamed the land “Palestine.”
In Vs 9, God says: Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery? Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?” says your God.
Many Canadians are wondering these days: Is there hope for Canada? Things seem pretty dark. Will Canada survive against all odds? Can a nation like Canada be born again in day? Will a revival of divine light sweep through our dark land? The existence of Israel, just like the existence of Canada, is miraculous. Humanly speaking, neither Israel nor Canada should have come into existence, or continued to exist. Yet God keeps breaking his advent light into both Canada and Israel. I don’t believe that God has given up on either Canada or Israel.
I see both Canada and Israel as like turkeys. Wild turkeys are amazingly good fliers, considering their substantial bodies. They reach treetops in seconds to escape predators. Once airborne, they can fly at 55 miles per hour! Domesticated turkeys, however, have lost this ability. The question for us Canadians is ‘will we be a wild turkey or a tame turkey?’ Can Canada learn, by waiting on the Lord, to fly like an eagle or at least like a wild turkey? How many of us here today want to be a wild turkey for Jesus? John A Macdonald our first prime minister was a wild turkey for Jesus.
John A Macdonald was a Moses figure who saw the promised land from sea to sea, that Canada might be born in a day.
Every time we spent a ten-dollar bill from 1971 to 2018, we came face-to-face with Sir John A Macdonald. In 2018, starting with Victoria, eight of Macdonald’s ten statues across Canada have been vandalized and removed by ‘cancel culture, though the one in Ontario’s Queen’s Park was recently returned. In the name of ‘tolerance’, inclusiveness, and diversity, John A.’ statues have been ‘beheaded’, excluded, and defamed. Three public schools have recently removed his name. Many youth have never even heard his name.
Could you imagine Americans removing their 100+ Washington statues and renaming the State and District/DC of Washington? Do we really want, in the words of a former Prime Minister, to be a post-national state with no core identity? Canada’s actual history is now at stake.
Though a complicated man with many flaws, Macdonald was the most famous of all Canadian leaders. Some of his tragic mistakes were the hanging of Louis Riel, the creation of native residential schools, and the 1885 Electoral Franchise Act which removed the right of Chinese people to vote. We must honestly admit John A.’s unfortunate weaknesses while not losing sight of his great accomplishments.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1815, he moved at age 15 to the land of his dreams with his family. Like Don Quixote, John A. dreamed the impossible dream that miraculously came true, a nation from sea to sea (Psalm 72:8). Against all the odds, Canada was birthed on July 1st 1867 and still exists, despite cries from some Quebecers and Albertans to separate. God keep pouring out his light on Canada, far more than we deserve or imagine.
Without Sir John A. Macdonald, BC would have been lost forever from joining Canada. BC would have become the 51st state, physically connecting to Alaska. Many American leaders publicly stated that it was BC and indeed Canada’s manifest destiny to join the United States. The vast majority of early BC settlers were Americans drawn from San Francisco by the 1858 Gold Rush. They certainly were not Eastern Canadians from Ontario. John A’s promise of the Canadian Pacific Railway won over the hearts and mind of ambivalent BCers. The American miners also liked the law and order of Governor James Douglas and Judge Matthew Begbie, protecting them from being robbed like in the American wild west.
After the tragic death of his invalid first wife Isabella, John A. married Agnes Bernard. They met on Dec 8th 1866 while both were sauntering down Bond Street in London. By Christmas, they were engaged. They wed six weeks later, at St. George’s Anglican Church in Hanover Square. This was definitely light breaking into John A’ painfully dark family situation.
Agnes spoke French better than her husband, a real asset in bilingual Canada. He now had a loving wife who worked tirelessly on his behalf –inviting Conservative MPS to his place for dinner rather than get drunk with them in the bars.
As a devout Anglican Christian, Agnes had a significant impact on her husband’s life, causing him to stop drinking and start attending church. John A was deeply impressed by the Beatitudes, and made a practice of reading his bible every night before bedtime. Another MP called Agnes ‘Macdonald’s good angel.’ Biographer E.B. Biggar suggests that Agnes may have extended his life by two decades, saving both his liver and his life. This again was Advent Light breaking into alcoholic darkness.
In 1888, during six weeks of Hunter-Crossley revival meetings in Ottawa, Prime Minister Macdonald had a deep encounter with Jesus Christ. John Hunter and Hugh Crossley were the Canadian Billy Grahams, leading two hundred and fifty thousand Canadians and Americans to Christ. As one journalist put it, “When the well-known form of the Honorable Prime Minister arose in the centre of the church, many strong men bowed their heads and wept for joy.” After dining at the prime minister’s home several days later, Rev John Hunter confirmed that “Sir John is a changed man.” Wherever Hunter and Crossley went in Canada, the bars became empty and the churches became full. How many Canadians know this amazing story of Divine light breaking into a politician’s soul? It is not easy for politicians to be saved with all the pressures they are under.
May the example of John A. and Agnes give us the will to love, live and forgive as a nation. May Albertans and Quebecers realize that we all truly need each other in this grand impossible dream of Canada. May God keep our land glorious and free, in Jesus’ name.
And finally, can we as God’s people, and you personally be born, be born again, in a day? Can Advent light break into our lives this very day? Can people who come from difficult family backgrounds really change? Can people who struggle with alcohol or drug addiction really be born in a day? Is change really possible? Can Jesus really change your heart, your family, one day at a time?
How many of you today are willing to change, to embrace God’s marvellous light, to be born again, to surrender your will to Jesus one day at a time? How many are willing to say no to darkness and yes to Jesus our Advent Light? How many want to walk in the Advent light as Jesus is in the light? Let us pray.
As you may know, Bishop Peter and I were converted during the Jesus movement. Peter was a real hippy, an Australian flower child. I was a wanna-be, influenced like many teenagers by that Haight-Asbury culture. You may remember the two-finger symbol of the hippie movement, the peace sign. In Christian Ashram movement, we have the three-finger symbol, meaning Jesus is Lord! Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords!
How many of you have ever watched the blockbuster movies Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell? We loved seeing Jesus portrayed asa flower power hippie. You may not know that Stephen Swartz, who wrote the Godspell music and lyrics, was Jewish. Talking about Jesus for many Jewish people is very edgy. It may feel to some like eating pork or secretly viewing pornography. But during the Jesus Movement, many Jews discovered the Flower Power Jesus, and became filled with the Holy Spirit, the Ruach Ha Kodesh. There are now over a million Jewish people worldwide who have accepted Jesus, Yeshua, even in Israel, where there are flourishing messianic synagogues. Messianic testimonies done in Hebrew and English are now being secretly watched on YouTube by millions of Israelis. This has never happened before. As the bible says in Romans 11:26, one day All Israel will be saved. The veil will be removed. The unthinkable will become thinkable. When I meet a Jewish person who loves Jesus, this gives me hope even for Anglicans that God will remove the veil. That is what he did for me as an Anglican in the Jesus movement.
Flowers have become popular for Jewish people through their time in Holland, the flower capital of the world. After the Holocaust which killed 75% of the Dutch Jews (think Corrie Ten Boom’s Hiding Place movie), some Dutch Jews relocated in Israel. The nation of Israel now exports 1.5 billion flower stems particularly to Europe in the winter, bringing two hundred million dollars per year. God is literally making the deserts of Israel bloom since Israel was reborn in 1948. Isaiah 35:1-2 comments: “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.” Israel has even discovered how to pipe desalinated Mediterranean water into the Sea of Galilee so that the flowers will keep blooming. How many today want your deserts to bloom?
Today I am preaching about God’s healing flower power. You may have to forgive me, but my sermon will be more flowery than usual. In my forty-five years of sermons, I have never preached about flowers.
I will be using flowers today as a metaphor for the healing power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not literally fire, rain, wind, or a dove, but those are accurate metaphors of how the Holy Spirit acts in our lives. How many have ever thought of the Holy Spirit metaphorically as like a flower? God gives the blessing of the Holy Spirit before we even ask. All we need to do is accept the gift, the bouquet by faith with thanksgiving. The famous painter Monet said: ““I must have flowers, always, and always.”
How many of you, by the way, have any Dutch heritage? Did you know that the Netherland’s #1 export is flowers? As the flower capital of the world with its massive greenhouses, it produces 50% of the world’s flowers. Have any of you, by the way, ever been to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in LaConner, Washington State? It is like a little Holland, attracting almost half a million people who spend up to 83 million dollars each year on tulips. Talk about flower power!
The term ‘flower power’ came from Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965, who advocated putting flowers in Berkley California to the rifle barrels of the military police during antiwar Vietnam rallies. They also gave flowers to the Hell’s Angels who really hated the hippies. In May 1967, Abbie Hoffman, founder of the Yippies and author of Steal This Book, organized a flower brigade in New York City, saying “The cry of flower power echoes through the land. We hall not wilt. Let a thousand flowers bloom. “
Flower power reached its peak during the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco when hippies like Bishop Peter became known as flower children, wearing flowers in their hair, like in the Godspell movie. How many of you remember the hit song by the Mamas & the Papas where they sang: “”If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair?” Bishop Peter, did you ever wear clothes embroidered with flowers? When the Beatles embrace the flower power message in their albums and their 1968 Yellow Submarine movie, it spread quickly, even to Perth Australia.
As Larry Norman said, the Beatles sang ‘All You Need is Love’, but then they broke up. The world’s ’love and peace’ flower power sounds good but it doesn’t really work.
Today I want to honour all those here from the Semiahmoo South Surrey Coalition who peacefully and lovingly said no to hard drug housing in our local neighbourhood. You proved that grassroots ‘flower power’ can make a real difference in the face of powerful, impersonal bureaucracies. Thank you again.
Today is our annual All Saints’ healing service. What does bring healing and recovery is not free government hard drugs but rather the power of the Holy Spirit as mentioned in Ephesians 5:18 “Don’t be drunk with wine (or stoned) which leads to dissipation but instead be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Any one who has received Jesus has the Holy Spirit living within them, but we can easily quench, grieve, resist, and vex the Holy Spirit through our unwillingness to surrender our wills.
The term ‘power’ in the New Testament is usually short-hand for the power of the Holy Spirit. Think of the resurrected Jesus in Acts 1:8 saying “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you..” Think of Jesus before his ascension in Luke 24, saying “Wait in Jerusalem until the power from on high comes upon you.” Bill W. in AA’s 12 Steps referred again and again to ‘powerless’ vs power coming through letting go and surrender. Bill W.’s higher power was the Holy Spirit after he was led to Christ by the Anglican pastor Sam Shoemaker. If you want to have ‘flower power’ healing today, you need to surrender to and receive the power of the Holy Spirit.
To quote Song of Solomon 2:1, you need Jesus the lily of the valley, the rose of Sharon in your heart. You may not ever have thought of Jesus as a flower, metaphorically speaking. 😉
Have you ever been to a funeral or celebration of life where there are no flowers? Flowers often symbolize death and endings. Flowers help us grieve and heal. Flowers are strongly connected with key transitions, births, graduations, weddings and funerals, what is sometimes called hatched, matched and dispatched. At such events, flowers are often sovereignly, even unexpectedly given to us, even before we ask. That is how God’s healing flower power works, before we even ask. Today God may answer your prayer before you even ask.
The Kingdom of God is all about the already/not yet, the future breaking into the present, every time we pray for healing for the sick. Healing is like God giving you a bouquet of flowers. Healing is part of our Kingdom inheritance. God is the healer, Jehovah Rapha. We are the receivers. An inheritance is only as good as your willingness to receive it by faith with thanksgiving. John 1:12 talks about those who receive Jesus and his unshakable Kingdom. If you refuse the flowers God is offering you today, it won’t do you any good.
IN vs 17, God says: See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
Revelation 21:1 quotes Isaiah 65 vs 17 saying “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.’ This is not the same old, same old. The Hebrew word here for ‘new’ is Hadassah, meaning renewal and restoration. Some of you may remember the world-famous Hadassah Jewish bazaars which raised money for the poor in Israel.
Vs 17 is telling us that our world and minds will be so renewed by God that our often traumatic memories will no longer haunt us. They won’t even come to mind. This is God’s healing flower power. How many of you would like Jesus to heal a painful memory today? You can come up at the end of this sermon and get a breakthrough.
Let me ask you: Do you think that there be flowers in the new heavens and new earth? Can you imagine life without flowers? Will there be flowers in hell? Only plastic ones 😉
Why do so many women love flowers so much? The women in our walking group told me that it is about the colour, the beauty, the smell and the touch.
Let me ask the women a question: do you prefer cut flowers or live flowers in pots or gardens. What is one of your most meaningful, memorable experience of receiving a flower?
You may have been through some real hard patches in your life. Do I hear any Amens? The desert times in your past does not determine your future blooming. Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.
As God’s new creation, we are no longer prisoners of our past; rather as Zechariah 9:12 puts it, we are prisoners of hope. God’s destiny for us that that we blossom into greater and greater Christlikeness. Jesus is the ultimate ‘flower child’ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Many of us struggle with negativity. Some of us as half-empty cup people tend to focus more on the thorns and weeds than the flowers. Some people could be given an entire field of roses and see only the thorns.
A friend in our last church resented someone else for being healed of cancer because they hadn’t had their own healing yet. Are you willing to celebrate the flowers of someone else’s healing while you are still experiencing the thorns, weeds, and sickness in your own life? Can you give God your bitterness today and receive his healing flower power?
We all need God’s Kingdom flower power. Song of Solomon 2:12 states, “Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” Would you like some flowers, some blessings, to appear in your life in this healing service?
Where does your prayer life need to blossom, to bloom, to flourish? Blossom, bloom, and Flourish, by the way, literally mean to flower. Do you need more healing to spring forth in your life ? CS Lewis said: “Think of yourself just as a seed patiently wintering in the earth, waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking.”
How many of you are gardeners? John 15:1 says that my Father’s the gardener, I often say that during doorknocking when I meet someone working on their flowers. Let me ask you: Those of you who love gardening, how often do you water your flowers? What hydrates your soul and makes you flourish? What kind of fertilizer do you need to be healthy? What kinds of weeds need to be removed from your spiritual garden?
Luke 5:17 says of Jesus: “the power of the Lord was with him to heal.”
Metaphorically, we might say that Jesus healed people with flower power, the power of the Holy Spirit:
Luke 5:30 says: “Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my garments?’”
“The whole crowd was trying to touch him, because power was coming out from him and healing them all.”
Acts 10:37-38says that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil, because God was with him.”
The Bible also compares us to flowers. Has anyone ever told you to bloom where you are planted, a good message for restless church-hoppers? Psalm 103:15-16 states, “The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more“. 1 Peter 1:24, quoting Isaiah 40: 6-8, says, “For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall“
Jesus in Luke 12:27 said “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”
Each of you are more beautiful than wild flowers. One of the beautiful flowers are sunflowers, would you agree? Sunflowers are symbols of God’s flower power, of his healing light.
How many of you have ever enjoyed eating sunflower seeds? They’re native to the Americas, as far back as 3000 BCE, when they were developed for food, medicine, dye, and oil. The Cherokee utilized an infusion of sunflower leaves to treat kidneys while the Dakota brought it out to sooth “chest pain and pulmonary troubles.” God wants to use his sunflower power to bring healing today to your heart.
It was the Spanish who brought Sunflowers back to Europe. Then they were brought to Russia by the Russian royalty. Sunflower seed oil was somehow not banned during Lent, unlike the other oils the Russian Orthodox Church banned its patrons from consuming. As a result, by the 19th century, Russia was planting two million acres of sunflowers every year.
Did you know that the Sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower? Canadian Mennonites who used to live in Ukraine, grow massive fields of sunflowers. Sunflower seeds are the Mennonite favorite snack, instead of drinking beer.
The sunflower tracks the sun, following it wherever it goes. God wants us to be devoted loyal sunflowers that consistently turns our eyes and hearts towards the Son of God, Jesus our messiah.
My younger sister and my late Mother Lorna, who was one of the founding pioneers at All Saints, loved gardening, especially their Sunflowers. Sunflowers aren’t just beautiful. Their roots absorb heavy metals and toxic radiation from the soil, in a process called phytoremediation. Sunflowers are symbols of healing and cleansing. Millions of sunflowers have been effectively used in cleansing the soil around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Japanese Fuchoshima nuclear disaster, absorbing sezium and strontium from the ground. What kind of toxicities and emotional poisons do you want Jesus our sunflower to remove from your soil today?
If anyone understood flower power, it was Vincent Van Gogh. He loved to paint sunflowers as a symbol of God’s glory. He said, “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” The Japanese love Van Gogh. On March 30, 1987, Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto paid the equivalent of US$39,921,750 for van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction at Christie’s London, at the time a record-setting amount for a work of art. Over a billion dollars has been spent purchasing paintings by Van Gogh; yet, he chose to live in poverty to reach the very poor for Christ.
As a pastor’s son, Van Gogh worked as an evangelist in a miserably poor mining district in Belgium. There, he gave away everything to the poor miners, and soon looked dirt poor. His church officials fired him for this indiscretion. He strongly identified with the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. He said, “Christ lived as an artist, greater than other artists. Jesus made living, human beings.” Picasso would call Van Gogh “the father of us all”, seeing him as his main inspiration,
Of his 900 paintings, Van Gogh sold only a few. He sadly took his own life at age 37, seeing himself as a failure as a painter. After he died, friends brought sunflowers with them to his funeral.
Many people don’t realize that as a pastor’s son, he evangelized people through his colourful yellow paintings. He loved the colour yellow so much that he even nibbled on yellow paint. Don’t try this at home. The lead and cadmium poisoning may have been why he cut off his ear.
A painting for Van Gogh is a sort of a gospel.
Vs 20 tells us that when God’s flower power breaks in, people are generally healthier and live longer, even till 100 years old. Have you noticed how drugs, alcohol, and smoking prematurely age us and shorten our lives? How many of you would like God, as Psalm 103:5 says, to renew your youth today like an eagle? How many want God to renew your strength, so that you will soar on wings like eagles, that you will run and not grow weary, that you will walk and not be faint? Jesus will cause our lives to flower when we surrender our will to Him.
In Vs. 24, God says: “Before they call, I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.”
This is a classic Eugene Peterson verse; God heals sovereignly before we even call, while we are still speaking. God is offering his healing flowers to us. We don’t have to twist God’s arm to heal us. God’s will is to heal us. All of us as believers will one day be promoted to glory, the ultimate healing.
Who today want a healing touch from God’s flower power? Let us pray.
Do you ever struggle to forgive people? You are invited to watch the powerful messages given at the July 18th Friday BC Christian Ashram Retreat: As We Forgive Others
BC Christian Ashram Retreat July 19th: As We Forgive Others
Matt Henson, Mark Hird, and Holly Roddam spoke on how forgiveness sets us free. Matt, who is the Executive Director for the UCAI, shared how the Christian Ashram experience could be a spark of revival both to the Church and to the world. Imagine a forgiveness revival transforming families and nations. To learn more about the BC Christian Ashram and the United Christian Ashram International, click on http://www.christianashram.com and https://christianashram.org
Francis and Judith MacNutt were one of the most remarkable healing teams of God that the world has ever known. Born in 1925, Francis MacNutt’s career dream was to become a medical doctor.
“But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name. Why, Lord, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your inheritance. For a little while your people possessed your holy place, but now our enemies have trampled down your sanctuary. We are yours from of old; but you have not ruled over them, they have not been called by your name.”
How many of you have skeletons in your family closet? A couple of honest people 😉 95% of people have skeletons in their family closet, and the rest are … liars, as Bishop Peter Klenner often comments about our mutual brokenness.
My Great-grandfather Tom Hird was a complicated individual. He was an Albertan beekeeper who sold his booze made from honey, called mead, to the RCMP. I am not sure how that worked😉 All my Hird relatives are Albertans going back to my great grandfather Tom. Does anyone hear have any Alberta heritage? My mother was the BCer from Revelstoke whose great grandparents moved there from Regina and Toronto. My great-great grandfather Tom Allen was the senior Alderman of the City of Toronto for 18 years, which may explain some of my political interests. Albertans who often love cowboys hats, particularly during the Calgary Stampede, are sometimes seen as honorary Americans. When my wife and I go overseas, Janice is often seen as a Canadian (being more gentle), and for some reason, they often think than I am an American 😉. This is probably my Alberta heritage.
My Saskatchewan-born wife lived in Calgary for ten years. Does that make her an honorary Albertan? What do you think? Have you seen that rude cartoon saying that California should join Canada and Alberta should join the USA. I thought that it was particularly insensitive. Let me tell you something potentially shocking: I love the three ‘A’s, 1) Albertans, 2) Americans, and 3) Australians, warts and all. Say hi online to Bishop Peter & Jenny who are vacationing in Perth Australia.
I am into that outdated biblical concept of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, even with tariff uncertainty. Canadians often pride ourselves on how good-tempered and kind and gracious we are. Some of that has been stretched recently with certain political uncertainties. It is too easy to curse those who make us feel uncomfortable. What if we bless those who may curse us, returning good for even potential harm? It saddens me that many perhaps drunken Canadians, egged on by our legacy media, are now becoming ruder than some of our southern neighbours, booing people at sports games. I don’t think that this is being a true Canadian. What ever happened to Canadian politeness?
We thank God for Psalm 133 chiselled on the Peace Arch: “Brethren dwelling together in unity.” Since the inconclusive War of 1812, we had have the best relationship as neighbouring countries with our southern and actually northern neighbours (including Alaska, because we are in the middle of the USA and they barely notice). That is very unique. Countries often like to quarrel and be grumpy, sort of like families. In this fractious time, we pray for a Peace Arch in the Spirit. I like the name Peace Arch Alliance Church 😉 Jesus said ‘Blessed are those who win the trade disputes.’ Or did he say ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.’ We say no, as Kingdom people, to hatred and bitterness in times of uncertainty.
Who is on the Canadian five dollar bill? Wilfred Laurier. Our seventh Canadian Prime Minister, who was our first francophone PM, brought the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Yukon into the Canadian Confederation, saying ‘Canada first, Canada last, Canada always.’ As one of our longest standing PMs, he was defeated after proposing the first free trade agreement with the USA. They falsely accused him of being unCanadian and advancing our annexation by the USA. I agree with his general sentiment as an penultimate statement, but not as a ultimate statement. Penultimate means ‘almost ultimate.’ I love our nation. For Christians, our nation is important but must come second. We are Jesus and Kingdom first, last and forever. It is far too easy for nationalism to become idolatrous if it is our ultimate value.
Great-Grandpa Tom Hird, by the way, was also a Methodist lay evangelist who preached the hot gospel. How many people know what the hot gospel is? How many have ever heard a ‘turn or burn’ sermon? In my family, we associated ‘turn or burn’ with street corner placard-wearing fanatics, predicting the imminent end of the world: ‘It’s all going to burn, brother.’ Or as they say down south, ‘It’s all go to burn, baby.’ 😉
I won’t be preaching a ‘turn or burn’ sermon today. So you can relax. Instead, I will be preaching a ‘return or burn’ sermon. Unless we return home to our Father, nothing will work right. Do I hear an amen?
Unless we return home to our Redeeming Father, we will burn with anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, and emptiness. Some of you know exactly what I am talking about because you have lived this. I lived this out before I turned to Jesus. You see, Hell is not just for life after death. Hell is for right now when we refuse to return home to our Father. Sin and selfishness is hell on earth right. Do I hear an amen? Eternal hell is just a continuation of our selfishness and alienation. Ultimately, God will let us have our own way, and if we ultimately say no to God, it is hell. It is alienation, it is darkness, it is brokenness. Whatever burning ultimately means, how literal it is, you don’t want to go there.
I used to be a sailing instructor for YMCA Camp Elphinstone with little Sabas and 25-foot sailboats. Was anyone ever in YMCA and YWCA? Before they largely forgot the ‘C’ of YMCA, the YMCA and YWCA used to be strongly Christian, being founded by Sir George Williams, the Billy Graham of the 19th Century. Everything in sailing, by the way, is about turning and returning into the wind. Do we have any sailors here? If you just go in one direction and never tack with the wind, it will not go well. The Holy Spirit is often described as like the Wind. How are you with tacking with the wind of the Holy Spirit?
Yesterday, at our Coldest Night of the Year walkathon at the White Rock promenade, a very windy wet storm blew in, turning my golf umbrella inside out SEVERAL TIMES. Only when I turned my umbrella into the wind did things go well. It felt more like the Wettest NIGHT OF THE YEAR! Thanks, by the way, for all those who supported our Peninsula People team with Kerry-Lynne Findlay who ended in the top ten fundraising teams. It is not too late to still contribute online to this worthy cause as we raise money for the local Sources Food Bank.
All of life is about which direction we turn and return. Which direction however should we turn? I would like to do a thought experiment with you. How many are willing to humour me? Please will everyone close their eyes? What does the front of the church look like in your mind? Where is the back of the church? Where is the front entrance: is it at the front or the back of the church? Is the Sunday School room in the front or the back of the church building? Would you feel comfortable if I preached the rest of my sermon from the back of the church ;? Ultimately, which way should we turn: front or back? Where is God?
Because God is invisible, it is not obvious which direction we need to turn in returning to God. We don’t even realize sometimes that we’ve turned our back on God. Where is God? Because God is omnipresent, he’s everywhere, but he is also manifest in particular ways and locations as our returning Father. When he returns, his presence is made present. God sometimes turns his face away from us in our rebellion. Historically, Christians have prayed Eastward because Jesus, in his second coming, is returning from the East. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray towards Mecca in Saudia Arabia.
Because God is invisible, it is complicated. You can turn your back on God and not even know it. I did that for years as a distracted teenager who golfed and skied religiously. You can turn your back on your spouse or your family, and not realize it. You can be emotionally divorced for years before you ever leave your marriage. You can be there and not there, because you’ve turned your face from your spouse emotionally.
For many people in Canada, it is unthinkable to go to church. Some feel like the sky would fall if they came into a church building. A lot of people peer through the front door glass, but would never walk in. Some walk in five or ten feet, but to come up near the altar table is ‘radioactive’ in their mind. 😉 It’s very interesting.
My Hird family has sometimes powerfully turned to God, and sometimes turned our backs on God. Does anyone else relate to this? I am so grateful that our grandchildren all go to Sunday School and church. Many Christian grandparents nowadays are forbidden by their adult children to even mention Jesus to their grandkids, but they can still be salt and light. It is not easy.
Our Hird family ultimately comes from the Yorkshire area in England. Hird either means Shepherd or in the Viking Danish version ‘bodyguard to the King’. There were many Vikings in Yorkshire. I am 6% Viking in my dna testing. Are there any Vikings or partial Vikings in our congregation?
I discovered, while writing a Light Magazine article on the famous Yorkshire man Smith Wigglesworth that Yorkshire people are known for their earthiness, gruffness, bluntness, people who say what they think without fear of the consequences. I thought ‘This is my Hird family 😉’. They are honest, sincere, and avoid pretense. That Yorkshire tendency has sometimes got me in hot water in my almost 45 years so far of ordained ministry. Many pastors are pressured into being people-pleasers who pretend as a survival strategy. Wigglesworth, through his bold healing ministry which he received through the Anglicans in All Saints Sunderland, led millions worldwide to turn back to God.
Turning and returning to God is a huge theme throughout the Bible. In Joel 2:12-13, it says: “Yet even now, declares the LORD, return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion.” Many people are afraid to return to the heavenly Father because they mistakenly think that he is as bad-tempered as their own earthly father. My great-grandpa Tom had his moods. He did not have a good relationship with his son Vic. You see, we are made for our Father. God is our Father who doesn’t change despite the circumstances. He is our immutable Redeemer. As our kinsman-redeemer, He redeems us not only from sin, but also from selfishness, hatred, resentment, revenge, despair, hypocrisy, secrecy, and all sorts of disease. I think that we Canadians suffer from hypocrisy. We pretend to be nicer than we are. And painful people, like a certain unnamed president, are bringing out some of our undealt-with emotions. Some people say ‘I don’t like to fast because it makes me bad-tempered.’ But you know, fasting doesn’t make you bad-tempered. It reveals your bad temper 😉 As AA puts it, we are as sick as our secrets. Do you have any secrets that you need to return to our redeeming Father? What if we Canadians stopped pretending so much? In the AA Big Book, Rev. Sam Shoemaker, co-founder of AA with Bill W and Dr. Bob, said that if Christians would become even half as honest as AA people, we would see revival in God’s Church. But so many people come
to church and pretend:
“How are you feeling? Oh great, I’ve got cancer. My wife left me. I was fired at work. My kids won’t speak to me. But I’m good.’
Returning to the Lord is even used to describe Tithing our first 10% in Malachi 3:8-10. Have you ever imagined that returning to God might involve returning your pocket book to God? All things come of thee o Lord and of thine own have we given thee. I had never heard of tithing as an Anglican until I was walking in a Baptist church and saw a poster that said ‘10%’. I said: ‘What’s that?’ They said: ‘It’s how much you should give to God.’ I said: ‘Great idea. When I become financially secure, I will one day.’ Was I tapping into my inner Scottish desire for financial stability? Nine years later in 1981, when I lost my voice (spasmodic dysphonia) and income for eighteen months, It decided to put God to the test and give him my first 10%. 10% of nothing, I could afford. The Lord met our needs for that year. I had a wife and first child. When God restored my throat through prayer and surgery, I started as an assistant priest at St. Matthew’s Abbotsford with a real salary. I thought that I can’t stop tithing now. So I never stopped. How many might want to put God to the test today and see him open the floodgates of heaven? For some people, that is unthinkable. Those raised in state churches like Anglican, Catholic or Lutheran churches are notorious for not being super-generous in our giving, because the state looked after us. It takes the wind of the Holy Spirit to turn us around to biblical generosity.
The good news is that turning and returning goes in two directions: us to God and God to us. Isaiah 63 teaches that God is a returning Father. As Arnold Ballantyne texted me this week, God the Father is our inheritance, even when people turn away, ultimately God is our Redeemer. God’s desire is for us to revere Him. God the Father wants us to inhabit his holy place and not let His enemies be victorious. We belong to God. He calls us by name.
Acts 7:39 tells us that “Our fathers refused to obey God. Instead they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt.” All of life is about which direction we turn: either back to the slavery of Egypt or forward to freedom in God’s Promised Land. Even as Christians we can slip into going back to Egypt. Have you ever gone back to Egypt? It doesn’t satisfy, does it? Has God ever said to you: “About Turn.”? How did you respond?
How many watched Godspell where they sang “Turn back o Man, forswear thy foolish ways.”? Our messianic Jewish friend Marty Shub who did our last two seder suppers, has the fascinating last name ‘Shub’ or Shuv, which is Hebrew for turning, repenting, and returning. His ministry is called Return Ministries. Returning for Jewish people is both physical and spiritual. Since 1948, 3.3 million Jews have physically returned to Israel in what is called Aliyah, going up to Jerusalem. There have always been Jews in Israel, but most were sent into exile by the Romans, who renamed Israel as Palestine, in an effort to antisemitically obliterate their memory.
There are 381 occurrences in the bible of the word ‘turn’ and 499 occurrences of the word ‘return’, all of which we will be looking at for the next eight hours together. 😉 In Acts 3:19, Peter says, “Repent, then, and turn back, so that your sins may be wiped away, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.” How many of you want times of refreshing? Does Canada need this?
2 Chronicles 7:14 says that if we turn from our wicked ways, God will heal our land. I was converted in the Jesus revolution in which millions of young people turned back to Jesus. The word Revolution literally means to turn or roll full circle. How many today are willing to spiritually revolve back to Jesus?
Lamentations 3:40 says: “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.”
Acts 7:42 tells us: “But God turned away and gave them over to the worship of the heavenly bodies. (Astrology/ age of Aquarius)” Our Hird family dabbled in many new age practices, like horoscopes. The New Age is the way of idolatry and confusion. God turns away when we choose the identical twins of idolatry and idolatry, so prevalent in BC.
Jesus, in Matthew 18:3, said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change (KJV be converted, straphate, turn), and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.” Only children can turn. Adults suffer from stiff necks until we get child-like necks.
In Acts 28:18, Paul recalls what God said in his turning/shuving/conversion: “I am sending you to the nations to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those sanctified by faith in Me.”
Whatever you turn toward is what you turn into. Whatever you gaze on, you become. That is why pornography is so deadly. You become what swallows you. In the Christ child, you become more childlike and less childish. Only children can enter the Kingdom. Have you noticed how childish much of political discussion is becoming. What if we actually sat down and listened carefully to those with whom we may disagree? What if we stopped demonizing people with other political opinions?
God, in Zechariah 1:3, said “Therefore tell the people: This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Return to me,’ declares the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will return to you,’ says the Lord Almighty.” God the returning Father is calling us to return back home to Him. Where have you turned your back on God? Where do you need to seek his face? Are you willing to return back home? Are you willing to give up your idols? Are you willing to make Jesus your only hope? Let’s close in singing ‘Turn your eyes on Jesus’.
-a article in the December-January 2025 Light Magazine
(Healing Pioneers Series)
In 1932, when the healing ministry was neglected in many churches, Rev. Dr. John & Ethel Gayner Banks birthed an interdenominational healing ministry at St Luke’s Church in San Diego called the Fellowship of St. Luke. From that fellowship was formed The International Order of St Luke the Physician (OSL), incorporated initially in the state of California in 1935, and later in North America in 1953. OSL helped ordinary people realize that the healing ministry is not just for snake-handlers and religious fanatics. John Banks commented: “People are very scared of the healing ministry. They’re scared that nothing might happen, and they’re scared that something might happen.”
In the twentieth century, people became more aware of God’s healing power that is available to all people, not only through medicine but also through healing prayer. Earlier healing ministries in which John Banks had participated had been specifically Anglican/Episcopal. Dr. William De Orteaga commented that “Anglicans and Episcopalians have been among the most pioneering, persistent, and innovative leaders of the renewed Christian healing ministry of the last century and a half.” Many Anglicans however were unaware that there are twenty-two pages in the Book of Common Prayer on the healing ministry. All the Anglican healing ministries emphasize the close relationship between medicine and healing prayer. In 1914, the Society of the Nazarene was first sponsored by William Temple, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1926, the Society of the Nazarene was officially approved and endorsed by the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops as the healing organization of the Anglican Communion.
In the USA in 1920, Rev. Henry Wilson and John Gayner Banks established an American Branch of the Society of the Nazarene. Banks had moved from England as a layman to obtain a doctorate in therapeutic psychology at the University of Missouri. Wilson encouraged Banks to be ordained. After the death however of Wilson in 1929, the Society of the Nazarene withered away. Wilson’s family did not even allow the Banks to continue to use the Nazarene name.
While conducting a healing mission in California, John Gayner Banks met Ethel Tulloch, a top postal union leader. The economic panic of 1907 caused banks to collapsed, resulting in great unemployment. Ethel couldn’t find work, until she taught herself to type and do stenography, making herself invaluable for the post office. In 1908, the San Diego Post Office had no eight-hour day, pension plan, overtime, or sick leave. Ethel recalled, “These were the jungle days of the post office.” In January 1919, she was appointed fifth vice president of the National Federation of Post Office Clerks, the first woman to hold office. The Labor Leader (Sept. 1919) called Ethel a “live wire” and “one of the strongest workers for the cause in the country.” As a gifted writer, Ethel personally replied to complaints to the San Diego Postal Office: “She probably met more people…than any other person in the city. She was known for her courtesy in the treatment of the public.” Ethel commented:
Seventy-five percent of the friction and trouble in the world occurs because of misunderstanding — and so I consider it a favor when anyone, instead of harboring resentment or bitterness, asks for an explanation.
Because of her standing up for workers rights, Ethel was unfairly targeted by the Postmaster General Albert Burleson as a communist agitator. She almost lost her job and was put under severe scrutiny. The stress and exhaustion of this thankless 90-hours per week job left her ‘brain weary’. A specialist diagnosed her as having an incurable fatal illness. She suffered from incessant images of “pain… pain… pain. Pain and death…. Where could I hide from them?”
One sleepless night, Ethel dreamed about the opening lyrics to Rock of Ages: ‘From Thy side, a healing flood.’ She saw the Rock of Ages with Living water spilling like a healing flood through the Rock. She cried: “‘Lord help me’… from the bottom of my troubled heart.” Ethel then had a vision of Jesus in white robes bidding her to receive Holy Communion. His eyes glowed with such “yearning and tenderness and compassion.” Two hands stretched toward her from the light “with a loving welcome — and there were nail prints.” Jesus invited her to the altar. “I knew he was pleading ‘come unto me.’” Ethel realized: “Could not my sick body be made clean of disease by his body if he dwelt in me and I in him?” Her faithful obedience resulted in a miraculous healing of her body, mind, and emotions.
After reading Ethel’s Come from Away pamphlet about her healing, John Banks appointed her as convenor for the Southern California Chapter of the Society of the Nazarene. John and Ethel were married a year later in 1929 at Calvary Church, New York City by Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now John Banks was no longer a widower. While on their honeymoon, they visited all the healing homes in England and America, dreaming of drawing them all together into a world healing fellowship.
The Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 recommended the restoration of the Sacrament of Healing, or Holy Unction, after prayer and preparation, and where moral and intellectual difficulties exist, confession as well. Lambeth also suggested for complete restoration, that prayer for healing be followed by the Sacrament of Holy Communion, which is also a sacrament of healing.
Ethel Tulloch Banks’ original two-page newsletter grew in 1937 to become the OSL Sharing Magazine, the oldest continuously published Christian healing journal in North America. Ethel as a gifted writer and theologian did much of John’s writing, so that some of what appeared under John Gayner Bank’s name was in fact her work. The Banks’ strong emphasis on Jesus and the sacraments gave an alternative to sick people who were otherwise tempted to get ‘healing’ through the very popular Christian Science and the New Age/Thought movements.
Ethel conducted Monday prayer meetings for forty years, beginning each session with the question: “Has anyone been a witness to faith?” The Banks were convinced that Christ’s power to heal to-day is just as great as it was when He walked on earth. One of Dr. Banks sayings was, “A little faith brings little results; greater faith, greater results; and marvelous faith, marvelous results.”
OSL is committed to
Promoting the restoration of the Apostolic practice of healing as taught and demonstrated by Jesus Christ;
promoting a sound pastoral and counseling ministry;
promoting the practice of holding healing services in every church;
developing local chapters to promote healing missions, workshops and prayer groups in their area.
OSL believes that
God uses many agencies for healing: some are spiritual such as prayer, love, faith, anointing with oil, and the laying on of hands;
some are medical such as medicine, surgery, and psychology.
These agencies should be supportive of one another.
God’s desire for us is wholeness and health.
Christian healing is accomplished through faith in Christ and through subjecting one’s entire life to the scrutiny and counsel of God.
Jesus Christ is alive today and still possesses all power on earth as in Heaven.
We pray that John & Ethel Banks and the OSL might inspire us all to recover the healing ministry of St. Luke the Physician: “Almighty God, who inspired your servant St. Luke the Physician to set out in the Gospel the love and healing power of Your son. Make obvious in Your Church the love and power for the healing of our bodies and souls, to the praise and glory of Your Name, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
Vs. 1 Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!
I will never forget at age 17 going to the Led Zeppelin concert in Dec 1971 with my Jewish friends from India. My original favorite rock band was the Animals, followed by my next favorite band Led Zeppelin. I was hoping that the heavens would open, so to speak, at this concert, and I would have this amazing experience. Instead it was just ordinary. The disappointing ordinariness of this concert tempted me to almost dropping acid in search of this ultimate experience. Fortunately, my Scottish side protected me from my foolishness. There was no way I was going to be overcharged $4 for LSD. A month later, God ripped open the heavens and gave me the ultimate experience that changed my life for ever. I had a Damascus Road conversion to Jesus Christ that brought inner healing and significance to a very lost soul. I was born again, and never have recovered from this.
The term ‘Oh’, as in Oh that you would rend the heavens, is used 207 times in the bible to express a range of emotions including surprise, anger, disappointment, or joy. Just think of the song ‘Oh Susannah’ or the expressions ‘Oh Boy!’ or ‘Oh no!’ Sometimes we become dead to this phrase, or use it without meaning such as OMG.
The word ‘rend’, by the way, can be translated ‘break down the door and come and rescue us.’ Do you ever wish that God would appear on earth, just show up, break down the door, so to speak, and make things right? There are many rending of the heavens in the Old Testament like the burning bush with Moses in the desert, the fire coming down on Mount Carmel with Elijah and the receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai with Moses. The ultimate rending of the heavens was with Jesus being born at Bethlehem and the Holy Spirit poured out on Jesus at his baptism. For us his Church, we were birthed with a great rending of the heavens on the Day of Pentecost. Times of revival and renewal are wonderful times of the rending of the heavens. Each Sunday in the liturgy, we often say Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again, the final rending of the heavens. Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus.
Does God ever feel abstract or meaningless to you? How many have ever read or seen HG Wells’ book The Invisible Man? Sometimes God feels like the invisible man. Are you willing to forgive God for being invisible most of the time? God’s invisibility easily tempts us to seek idols, because idols are visible. Jesus is God’s solution to the problem of invisibility.
Isaiah was longing for God’s presence. Are you longing right now for the things of God? What is your passion, your longing? Do you have a passion to know Jesus better? James 4:8 says, if you draw near to God, he will draw near to you.
The Christian Ashram retreat was founded by E. Stanley Jones in 1930, 94 years ago. In this retreat, which I lead in BC, we always start with the time of the open heart. In the early days, the Open-Heart time could last for up to four hours of people sharing about three questions: Why did I come? What do I want? What do I need? Just for a brief moment, not for the next four hours, I am inviting you to share why you came to All Saints today. Secondly, what do you want from God at this healing service? Thirdly, what do you actually need today?
Vs. 2 As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you!
Vs. 2 talks about God coming like fire, a powerful symbol of the Holy Spirit. How many of you have ever had a fireplace? How many currently have a fireplace? Santa in the old days used to deliver presents through the fireplace. It has been a lot more challenging more him for so many homes lacking chimneys and fireplaces. You may or may not be aware that Janice and I are currently working on a book on E. Stanley Jones: Fire in God’s Fireplace. There is a lot of counterfeit wildfire out there that just burns people up, and leaves communities burnt out and burnt over. Revival and renewal can easily be imitated and manufactured in the flesh. All Saint’s is a wonderful fireplace. All Saints is so healthy, such an amazing gift in a time of great confusion and distraction. To be healthy, it really helps to be in a healthy Christian community. Being a Spirit-filled healthy community, as Bishop Peter often reminds us, is about surrendering our will. As the Lord’s Prayer puts it, Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. The church is God’s family. Healthy children need healthy families.
Vs. 3 For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.
Vs. 3 talks about trembling. Paul, who was deeply immersed in the book of Isaiah, alludes simultaneously in 1 Corinthians 2:9 to Isaiah 64:4, Isaiah 52:15, and Isaiah 65:17.
However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him.”
Can you imagine how will one day change when it begins to tremble at God’s presence? In Isaiah 66:2, it speaks of the humble and contrite in heart trembling at God’s Word. Have you ever trembled at God ‘s Word or at his presence? We as Canadians need to recover a holy fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom. Healing comes through our recovering a sense of God’s awesomeness. Even more than a beautiful Crescent Beach sunset, God’s presence can be very healing and calming.
Vs 4 Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
Vs. 4 says that waiting is key to healing. One of my favorite bible verses in Isaiah 41:31 “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles.“ Waiting is never easy, particularly when you are a child waiting for Christmas. I will never forget when my grandmother showed us where my parents were hiding all our presents.
I served at age 5 as a shepherd in our Kindergarten Christmas Pageant. Sadly I got lost and waited to be found. But they never did find me. I secretly think that because of my lost shepherd incident, that I missed my potential career as a famous Hollywood actor. There might have been a Hollywood agent waiting in the kindergarten audience to discover their next child Hollywood actor. Speaking of child actors, I had the privilege of interviewing 12-year old Ollie Herdman for the Light Magazine. The Herdmans (or to be politically correct, the Herdpersons) were the worst family ever in the entire world, yet they wanted to be part of what became the Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever. We laughed and cried at that movie with three of our grandkids. How many of you have seen this amazing Christmas movie yet?
It is remarkable how God acts and heals those who actively wait for Him. The Bible again and again challenges us, as in Psalm 27:14, Psalm 40:1, and Psalm 130:5-6, to wait for the Lord Healing is a waiting game. Our refusal to wait is often a refusal to heal. One of my greatest weakness is when in my impatient impetuosity, I refuse to wait. I am not willing. I want my healing right now. True love waits. Waiting heals and transforms us. How many of us are grateful for how God miraculously gave us this building in Crescent Beach? So am I, but I in my Hird impatience didn’t like how long it took to receive the recent Crescent Beach miracle. How many are believing that God will come through in enabling up to get the repairs done on the building? What if this latest miracle takes longer than I impatiently want it to? Are you ever tempted to use fear and guilt to get your own way, rather than wait patiently on the Lord? Never say yes to people who try to manipulate you through shame and telling you that the sky will fall.
God acts for those who wait. You may have heard the phrase ‘Good things come to those who wait.’ Do you need healing today? Is healing worth waiting for? Have you ever received a healing that took time? Have you ever received a partial healing that developed into a fuller healing later, like the blind man Jesus prayed for who initially saw people looking like trees. Jesus’ second touch gave him the full healing. Do any of you today need a second touch from Jesus?
God’s delays are not always God saying ‘no’. Sometimes God says ‘slow’ or ‘grow’ before he says ‘go’. I hate being on waiting lists. I really don’t look forward going to emergency wards nowadays, like at Surrey Memorial with its 20-hour wait. But waiting can be deeply healing as we surrender to the Healing Father. Don’t be afraid of healing tears as you wait. Which direction are you facing as you wait for things to happen? Grumpy waiting can look like picking up your marbles and leaving. Turning itself is deeply healing depending on the direction that we are turning. Many atheists nowadays are obsessed with the god that they don’t believe in. They have turned their face away from not only God but also painful situations that they don’t want to deal with. What is it that we can’t face in our lives? Biblical waiting is all about turning and returning to the healing Father. What if we turned our face openly to the Potter of our souls?
Roberto Escamilla in his book Prisoners of Hope said: “One of the most beautiful stories E. Stanley Jones told (repeatedly) was about the little girl who came to church with a broken doll in her hands… She was crying because her doll was broken. She asked the pastor perhaps the most meaningful question anyone could ever ask: ‘Is this the place where they heal broken hearts? Roberto said: “If I only had one sermon to preach, it would be about broken hearts. If I had only one song to sing, it would be ‘There is a balm in Gilead’ to make the wounded whole. If I had but one story to tell, it would be about the little girl and the broken doll. And if I had only one thing to say and one sermon to preach, I would preach about the One who has the power to heal broken hearts. Because that is a universal need. Somewhere along the way, your heart is bound to be broken. Psalm 147:3-4 ‘He heals the broken-hearted…He determines the number of stars.’…
As Roberto put it, one of the church’s primary responsibilities is to heal broken hearts, broken lives, and broken bodies; to heal and repair brokenness, all kinds of brokenness. The church is the hospital for sinners with spiritual needs, for all kinds of brokenness…The church is the place where we must always answer categorically, ‘Yes, this is the place where we specialize in healing brokenness -all kinds of brokenness!’ Is there a way, said Roberto, to help men and women with broken lives, broken health, broken homes, broken dreams, and broken hopes? Is there One who can heal brokenness when everything is broken? Is there One who can help us put it together again – help us get it all together? It is our mission as Christians to reach out and offer sustaining love to all persons with broken hearts.
Vs. 5 You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways; But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved?
In vs. 5, Isaiah asks a very good question: How can we be saved? Many people in BC have become so secularized and emotionally cut off that they don’t even think that they need saving. If we don’t understand the human condition, we will not get our need for a saviour. As Bishop Peter often says, 95% of people are broken. The rest are liars. Broken people need a saviour, need a potter who can mend the broken parts. In BC and Canada, we need far more than just political salvation. Even a needed change in government is not enough to fix BC and Canada. We need Jesus. His Hebrew and Greek name Yeshua/Jesus means salvation. Vs. 5 teaches that a key to God turning up is our remembering God’s ways. Many of us suffer from spiritual amnesia.
Vs. 6 All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
Vs 6 is the Romans 3:23 of the Old Testament: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Sin is just another word for our selfishness and rebellion. At the middle of the word ‘sin’ is the letter ‘I’. Our self-centeredness has the ability to destroy the best things in our lives. I can make us sick. The most selfish are often the most self-righteous. Our self righteousness is a huge block to self-surrender and healing. We are reluctant to acknowledge humanity is fundamentally flawed and sinful from birth. I used to believe that education would solve all problems. Many still believe that science and technology will solve all problems. A few naive people still believe that more government will solve all life’s problems.
Vs. 7 No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins.
Vs. 7 talks about our unwillingness to listen to advice, even from God. One of my scariest moments as a teenager was when my mother was so frustrated with me that she would say: “Go ahead, do whatever you want.” I knew then that I was really in trouble when my mother was ready to give me up to my selfishness. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. If you really want the kosher cure, you have to understand the Jeremiah 17:9 reality. Our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked. Who can understand them?
One of the areas where I have deceived myself is sometimes confusing my impatient impulsiveness with being led by the Holy Spirit. When I let impatience lead me, it is more likely in the flesh than in the Spirit. Proverbs 14:29 says that whoever is patient has great understanding. My family default coming from a long line of blacksmiths and master mechanics is to get the job done. As someone who has been ordained for 44 years, God and people have tested my patience many times. What have I regretted since I was ordained in 1980? Those times when I impatiently rushed in where angels feared to tred. I have a pioneering anointing. It is deep in those who formed the Anglican Mission.
Business entrepreneurs like my late father are vulnerable to this temptation of impatiently doing things in the flesh, in their own wilfulness, of not surrendering their will to the healing Father. My dad so much disliked waiting for elevators that he moved from the second floor to the first floor at the Peninsula senior’s residence. My mother, who really heard from God, often held my dad back from his impatience. She would say ‘Ted, Ted’ in short staccato, and my dad would often calm down and think before acting impatiently. Sometimes Mom would say ‘Oh Ted’ to redirect his impatience. 😉
I was reminded this week that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, ….patience. True love is willing to wait patiently. True joy is willing to wait joyfully. True peace is willing to wait peacefully. I discover this week that I still need to keep growing in this area. My belt buckle symbolizes the testing of my patient waiting this week. While about to doorknock in Langley, my belt buckle disconnected. I grabbed some red ducktape to temporarily hold my belt together. There were no belt buckle clothing shops open at 9am near our campaign office on Fraser Highway. Someone said that there was a Walmart somewhere in Langley. But I didn’t have time or a real sense of direction. My GPS sent me three miles away from the correct doorknocking destination. My patience was really being tested. Guess where GPS sent me to: Walmart where I grabbed a new belt. Thank God for GPS being led by the Holy Spirit, and helping me grow in patient waiting.
Dr Gary Chapman in his book Five Languages of Apology said that the first language is ‘I’m sorry’ which taps into regret. In my family, we never said that we were sorry until I came to meet Jesus. Self-righteous people very rarely sincerely say that they are sorry. They hardly ever admit that they are wrong. Is it easy to admit that our righteous acts are like filthy rags?
My impatience at times have caused my relationships to shrivel up like a leaf and like the wind carry me away. Have you ever noticed that you can’t really control other people? They don’t like it and it doesn’t work. When I impatiently try to fix and control other people, say like my wife, she doesn’t always appreciate it. 😉
Vs. 8 Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.
Vs. 8 talks about God being a potter. in High School, I took a ceramics course, even creating my own toilet bowl ceramic. Have you ever thought of God as a ceramics coach? God loves healing cracked pots. We have a professional Crescent Beach potter in our walking group who sells his pottery every summer in Newfoundland. Were any of your dads into making pottery? The Fatherhood of God revealed in the Old Testament, and magnified by Jesus in the New Testament, is such good news in the midst of our sinfulness and brokenness. Cracked pots bring the best light.
Vs 9 Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people.
Vs. 9 ask God to have amnesia about our sins. How many of you would like God to forget your sins? In Isaiah 43:25, God says “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” In Jeremiah 31:34, and quoted in Hebrews 8:12 and 10:17, God says, “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” As Corrie Ten Boom put it, God casts our sins into the ocean and then puts up a fishing sign. That is what the cross accomplishes. Without the cross, there is no lasting forgiveness. Forgiveness brings healing.
10 Your sacred cities have become a wasteland; even Zion is a wasteland, Jerusalem a desolation. 11 Our holy and glorious temple, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.
Vs. 10 and 11 speaks about the plight of Jerusalem on Mount Zion. When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, the Jews were devastated. Everything that they trusted in had been destroyed. Sometimes life can feel like everything is ruined. Many of us feel that we no longer recognize the Canada that we grew up in. Everything seems broken. Much of Canada feels like a emotional wasteland with inflation, violent crime and rampant drug usage. In such difficult times, what do we trust in? Might Jesus bring healing to our broken land of Canada? As 2 Chronicles 7:14 puts it, If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and I will heal their land. Does Canada need healing?
12 After all this, Lord, will you hold yourself back? Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure?
Vs. 12 cries out to God to fix us crackpots. God is worth waiting for. His forgiveness is deeply healing. Can anyone tell us about the health benefits of sin and selfishness? It’s just not good for us in either body, mind or spirit. Turning and returning to our healing Father is always the healthiest thing that we can do
God knows you by name. That is deeply healing. Jesus remembers you. Jesus will never forget you. You are unforgettable. You are beloved. He gave everything for you on the cross. He held back nothing for you. Your healing is in his shed blood on the cross. He loves you with an everlasting love. He will never change his mind. Let our hearts come alive together. It is impossible to underestimate the hardness of our hearts, but Jesus can give us hearts of flesh. Do you want a soft heart today? Would you like Jesus to heal your heart? Let us pray…
I have to warn you that this is going to be a relatively bloody sermon. How many of us have ever been bit by a spider? For the first time in my life while doorknocking perhaps 20,000 homes with Bryan Tepper, I was attacked twice by huge black mechanized spiders. I actually jumped back for a moment in shock. But fortunately those low-tech spiders didn’t actually draw any blood. Makes me wonder though about the next generation of AI Halloween spiders. 😉
Peace Arch News reports that the ‘House of Horrors’ is opening for 24th year in Surrey.
Gibbons commented: “Halloween is growing by leaps and bounds, and I think it’s going to catch up to Christmas one of these days, in the way of spending and that sort of thing, decorating.”
They went on to say: “The new Abomination house offers Texas Chainsaw Massacre-themed thrills on a “farm” with an old RV.
“It’s pretty cool looking with a very bloody kitchen and a bedroom and all that sort of thing,” Gibbons reported. “The farmer has some issues, shall we say. He likes to experiment in dastardly ways, so it’s very cool. I walked through it in the dark for the first time last night and with the lighting and everything, it’s amazing.”
My strongest memories of Halloween are my dressing up as my hero Superman. My dear mother made my superman costume, and even ordered me a blue wig because I was convinced from the comic books that Superman had blue hair. Halloween back in the 1950s and 1960s was pretty bloodless. For me, it was more about avoiding kryptonite than watching out for bloody displays. I must confess that I didn’t really like eating my large bag of collected Halloween Candy, so being a good entrepreneur, I made money selling it to my sisters. Halloween decorations however have become much darker, bloodier and violent than those relatively innocent days. For many, Halloween has become an increasingly adult blood sport. 73% of North Americans bow the knee to Halloween. Last year, a record $12.2 billion dollars was spent in North America on Halloween, $4.1 billion alone on costumes. This is up from the previous $10 billion dollars in 2022. Perhaps we could persuade people to donate some of their Halloween money to the Oikos renovations at All Saints Crescent Beach. 😉
Some experts say that adults are only supposed to have 25 grams of added sugar a day. Many Halloween candies are made of 80-90 percent sugar. Halloween nowadays is almost a prediabetic training day. RF Kennedy Jr. says that sugar overconsumption is linked to an epidemic in childhood diabetes and other chronic diseases, up from 6% to 60%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of their children. By contrast, only 3% of Japanese children are suffering from obesity.
Secular culture is also obsessed with dabbling with evil at Halloween because we have been tricked into thinking that evil is just a big joke. Many woke Canadians think that there is no evil, no devil, no right and wrong. Morality and truth are all relative, depending who is in power at that moment. Politicians, however, when they don’t believe in good and evil, in right and wrong, so easily sell their souls to the devil for political and financial advantage, present company excluded. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said “The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value.”
What do you think of when you think of Christmas wreaths? The hottest new Halloween item I kept seeing while doorknocking is bloody Halloween wreaths with skulls and decapitated hands. As I contemplated the spiritual pull of Halloween while doorknocking, I realized afresh that modern Halloween is obsessed with death. Irish Americans imported many druid religious practices into the darker side of Halloween. Druids loved to focus on ghosts, demons, witches, and other deadly, half-alive entities. In 1 Corinthians 15:26, the bible tells us that “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Death is an enemy that cannot be defeated by ourselves, no matter how many bloody Halloween items we place on our front lawns. Why does Halloween have such a strong pull on our culture? Hebrews 2:15 gives the reason: The fear of death actually makes us slaves until the blood of Jesus on the cross sets us free. Until we surrender and receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour, turning from our darkness, we remain in slavery. By the way, if you have never surrendered your will to Jesus and turned from your sins, you could do that this very morning. Just go to one of our prayer teams and tell them that you want to surrender your will to Jesus.
I discovered by the way while recently doorknocking that politics is indeed a blood sport even in BC. Charles Dickens in 1841 said that good people in the United States often avoid running for politics, because the press is so nasty towards them, mercilessly destroying their reputation. Sadly, politics in Canada and the accompanying media coverage is getting much bloodier. Our famous Canadian politeness is under assault. Some people think that it is their god-given right to be hateful and rude to others politically. Alexander Solzhenitsyn prophetically said: “Why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis – race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today.”
Politeness however is not completely dead in Canada. I saw that politeness with our politicians speaking at the local White Rock/South Surrey Leadership Prayer Breakfast.
While doorknocking, some people told me how they are going to vote for another political party, and then apologized to me, saying that they are sorry.
Any one nowadays who chooses to be involved in politics will be attacked and wounded, at least by mechanical spiders. To give a personal example, I kept cutting my hands and arms while carrying sharp lawn signs. Then I bashed my left ankle on a hidden plastic pipe, causing a bloody mess. It has taken weeks to fully heal up. It has given me a new understanding for the five wounds of Christ that many people contemplate in prayer, including the wound in his ankle. Spiritually speaking, many wounds in our life will never heal unless we remove the dirt of sin and cleanse our hurts in the healing blood of Christ, especially at Halloween.
Has any noticed that our southern neighbours are having an election? Charles Dickens in 1841 said because of their Congress having elections every two years unlike the Senate every six years, they never get a rest, a sabbath from politics. When you never get a sabbath, a break from something, it has become an idol. I had a very political friend on the North Shore who broke up with his MLA (Member of legislature) girlfriend because she never took a sabbath break from politics. She was political to the very core of her soul. Here’s a quick way to discover one of your hidden idols. What are you actually doing instead when you skip church and/or skip reading your Bible and praying? If it’s sports, or sleep, or siblings or Halloween or politics, those are your idols. Politics easily becomes an idol to the politically involved. Politics as an idol can become bloody and deadly. Just think of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao Se Tung. We need to pray the blood of Jesus over the American election and even our BC election ‘hanging chad’ results so that we don’t end up with a bloody mess.
My late dear father was an agnostic and Sunday morning golfer for much of his life until he was converted in his 50s. As a former United Church member, my father didn’t have pornography in our house, which in the age of the internet nowadays is quite unusual. My engineering father never swore sexually or even about Jesus Christ. This is in stark contrast to our current highly sexualized conversation, with many younger men and even women swearing like troopers, dropping f bombs and Jesus Christ references almost casually. Being a former boy scout, my father rarely ever swore, only when he was deeply upset. His strongest swear word was the rather nonsensical British term ‘bloody hell’. I read that in Australia, bloody is just a generic adjective used to intensify any other noun like someone affectionately being called a bloody idiot.
In today’s passage Isaiah 62, vs 1, Jesus the Jewish Messiah prophetically says to Israel and the nations: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her vindication shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch.
Just like my other recent sermons on Isaiah 60 & 61, this is a messianic passage about Jesus who will not keep silent. Have you ever wondered why Bishop Peter will not keep silent about the bloody darkness of Halloween? Because he doesn’t want us to be deceived. Similarly, Jesus wants Israel and the nations to be set free from deception and gross darkness.
Why do so many of us love to sing “O Canada our home and native land”, especially at hockey games? We all long for a homeland. We all long for home sweet home. As Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz so powerfully concluded, there is no place like home. Woke DEI people love to make us like aliens in our own land of Canada. Government corruption and overspending is causing many Canadians to fear becoming homeless. Many young people in BC now fear that they will never have a place to call home.
Homelessness has deeply shaped the Jewish experience. The song ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ was written by a Jewish person experiencing pogroms and longing to return to Jerusalem. At the end of every Passover feast, after drinking the fourth cup of redemption, Jewish people say ‘next year in Jerusalem’. The first written occurrence occurs in a tenth-century poem by the Spanish rabbi Joseph ibn Abitur.
Strong biblical themes of exile and restoration in Isaiah 62 particularly relate to the land, what Jews call in Hebrew Eretz Israel. Too often being landless and homeless is a very deep metaphor in the Bible for the Jewish people. Accordingly, salvation and redemption for the people of Israel is not just seen as a subjective private experience in one’s heart but rather an actual restoration to one’s land by the Saviour. The cry Hosanna to Jesus on Palm Sunday meant Save us Lord. Save us from the Roman oppressors. Save us from our next potential exile from the land, as happened with the Jews until their miraculous restoration in 1948. Never before has there been a nation like Israel restored from exile after almost 2,000 years. Who might have imagined that the people of Israel, after almost being completed obliterated by Hitler in the Holocaust, might return to their homeland?
Psalm 122:6 challenges us to pray for the peace, the shalom of Jerusalem. Since the bloody Oct 7th massacre a year ago, it is more important than ever for Zion’s sake that we do not remain silent in our prayer for the people of Israel. Jerusalem is mentioned three times in this passage, Zion twice, and the city once. Biblically speaking, there is both an earthly city of Zion, Jerusalem, and a heavenly city of God, called the new Jerusalem. God cares for both the physical and spiritual. In the book of Revelation, the heavenly city and earthy city of Jerusalem become one when Jesus returns to earth.
In Isaiah 62, vs 2, Israel and the nations are told that “The nations will see your vindication, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will bestow.”
How many have actually visited Jerusalem? We went in 1980 and were booked to return to Jerusalem in 2020 when the whole world was locked down. The ultimate glory of Israel is its messiah, Yeshua, Jesus the Christ. Sadly, many Jewish people believe that to believe in Jesus is to abandon their identity as Jews. You can be an atheist Jew, a Buddhist Jew, a new age Jew. Only Jesus is seen by many as verboten. He is only for the Gentiles. Yet Jesus/Yeshua is the most famous Jewish person who has ever existed.
Speaking of identity, what is your middle name? Do you identify with it? Is it you? How many use your middle name rather than your first name? My dear late mother Lorna actually had Catherine as her first name. How many of you would like a new name? A new orientation. A new identity.
In 2018, I and over 200 others BC pastors signed the One Accord declaration calling the BC government to get rid of SOGI. In the One Accord, we said that, quote unquote, “We contend that the SOGI message contradicts the Christian truths, disrespects Charter values, and is harmful to school children, their parents, school teachers, and society as a whole,” For some reason, the government back then didn’t listen and doubled-down on the divisive and destructive SoGi agenda. This was the first time, by the way, in Canada that a government didn’t listen. 😉
Instead of SOGI, I would like to share with you today your Spiritual Orientation and Godly identity. Isaiah 62 VS 4 tells us that your new names, orientation and identity ( even more defining than your sexuality or gender) are Hephzibah and Beulah. I checked with our Christian walking group by the way and no one knew what these two names meant apart from being names of Baptist and Alliance Churches. But these two new names are God’s solution for the oppressive darkness around Halloween.
In Isaiah 62 vs 3, Jesus tells Israel and us as the nations that “You will be a crown of splendor in the Lord’s hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”
God sees Israel as a crown of splendour, a royal diadem which is a royal headband. The good news is that according to Romans 11:19, all the nations through faith in Jesus are grafted into the olive tree of Israel. We the Church have not antisemitically replaced Israel; rather we are mysteriously included. This is very good news! If God could break his covenant promises with Israel, he could do the same with us as the gentile nations. I thank God that he still loves Israel with an everlasting love, even as He calls us to reach the nations with his everlasting love. As Romans 1:16 reminds us, God is a missionary God, to the Jew first and to all the nations.
In Isaiah 62, vs 4, Jesus tells Israel and us as the grafted-in nations: “No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married.”
I recently read JD Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy where he speaks of profound desertion and abandonment again and again by his father and subsequent stepfathers and boyfriends of his addicted, violent mother. His childhood was a bloody mess that with the help of his grandmother Mamaw and his time in the US marines, he miraculously recovered, even getting a Yale law degree, a stable job and a good marriage and children. The good news is that JD Vance’s mom recently achieved ten years sobriety through AA & NA. Many addicts nowadays are poly-addicted, not just addicted to alcohol as in the old days.
AA & NA uses the acronym H.A.L.T. (Hungry. Angry. Lonely. And Tired) to describe when we are most vulnerable to temptation and addiction. Desertion is at its core existential loneliness. There is no limit to how stupid we can act when we are experiencing the deep pain of loneliness and forsakenness. Jesus quoted My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? on the cross from the key messianic passage Psalm 22. The word lonely was invented by Shakespeare, coming from the Latin word solus or solitude. Loneliness is the counterfeit of the monastic discipline of solitude and aloneness. For a teenager to not participate in the darkness of Halloween is often to be left deeply alone, and deserted like a fish out of water. Self-isolation is connected to what AA calls the moving cure. When we hide from others, even in plain view, our anxiety and pain temporarily reduce, but always bounce back with greater anxiety and pain.
Bishop Peter often talks about how difficult it is to do community in our individualistic western culture, and yet how vital it is to our spiritual growth. I am grateful how Bishop Peter keeps refocusing us on prayer & community, especially in this increasingly bloody season of Halloween.
Have you noticed how people love to blame and persecute the Jews? When in doubt, it is always their fault. Think about the Egyptians followed by the Assyrians followed by the Babylonians followed by the Greeks followed by the Romans: none of them treated Israel well. Again and again, the Bible describes how the people of Israel have been exiled from their deserted and desolate land for a season.
But God has never given up on his covenant faithfulness with Israel. Even in exile and brokenness, God calls the Jewish people Hephzibah, which means he still delights in them. Jewish tradition tells us that Hephzibah was the name of Isaiah’s own daughter. The root hafz means “guarding” or “taking care of,” to safeguard.” How many of us would welcome God’s safeguarding, his delight, during this bloody Halloween season?
Don’t by the way confuse Hephzibah with Hezbollah (the “Party of God”), the terrorist group in Lebanon. Hephzibah was the name of King Hezekiah’s wife. Those who are sci-fi buffs will know that Hephzibah is the name of Catwoman or Lady Kitten with the Marvel Comics XMan series. After Christopher Summers, AkA Corsair saved Hephzibah from being eaten alive at a banquet), she fell in love with him, swearing an eternal bond.
We as Hephzibah delight in and love our bridegroom Jesus because he first delighted in and loved us. The good news in the messiah Jesus that God also delights in the nations, the goyim, and God also delights in you individually. He takes pleasure in you. Pastor Steve Doerksen, our White Rock/South Surrey Leadership Prayer Breakfast MC, said on Friday that God is smiling on you. What if on Oct 31st during our Prayer Vigil, we contemplated how much Jesus delights in us and smiles on us?
Our other new name Beulah means married. Our sacramental marriage to Jesus is at the heart of true communion. Ephesians 5:22 says “This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.” Beulah is described by John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress as being on the borders of Heaven. My 47-year marriage with my wife Janice is heavenly; it has brought me much closer to King Jesus. Those of you who are married, never take your spouse for granted. Never stop dating and romancing them. If you want the intimacy of Beulah, you need to spend a lot of quality time with your spouse. Do I hear an Amen? Our All Saints Prayer Vigil starting tonight is Beulah quality time with our bridegroom Jesus.
One of my wife’s love language is quality time, which she sacrificed a lot of it while I was doorknocking for the last nine months. Since Janice had successful cancer surgery and radiation three years ago, every moment with Janice is a precious gift that I thank Jesus for. Yesterday Janice and I went on a romantic 12-hour date that started with a delicious meal at an AGM with our MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, and ended with a tasty Subway meal before watching the Kitsilano theatre production Billy Bishop Goes to War. Has anyone seen this play? A little too much swearing for me, but very well done. Planes fascinate us because both of our dads served in the Air Force in WWII. Remembrance Day at All Saints meant a lot to my late dad when he processed with Ralph Webb, wearing his WWII medals. Billy Bishop was our top Canadian flying ace in WWI receiving a Victoria Cross for 72 victories. He even fought in the air at Vimy Ridge where my grandfather Vic Hird was in the trenches. It was Billy Bishop, not Charlie Brown’s Snoopy, who actually fought the top WWI pilot known as the Bloody Red Baron. With a Canadian population of just eight million, our Canadian Armed Forces grew in size during WWI from just 3,000 to a remarkable 650,000 people. 66,000 Canadians made the ultimate sacrifice, including my two great-uncles Harry and Charlie. When Billy Bishop peacefully died at age 62, 25,000 Canadians lined the funeral procession.
The word deserted, by the way, comes from the word desert, meaning left waste, to be empty of people. Have you noticed how cold, wet weather can make Crescent Beach look like a ghost town? Have you ever felt deserted in your Christian Walk? Halloween is often experienced as a heavy, alienating time by people who want to seek first God’s Kingdom. We are in a battle, a battle over Jerusalem, a battle for the Soul of Canada, a battle for the Soul of BC.
Rejection and desertion are very close. Jesus was both rejected and deserted by almost everybody, except for the women disciples and John. Teenage Christians often feel great pressure to compromise with evil during the Halloween season in order to avoid being rejected. In Hebrews 13:5, Jesus our bridegroom tells us: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.””
How many have immigrated to Canada? How many have parents or grandparents who were immigrants to Canada? How many of your ancestors came because Canada was seen as the promised land? How many came because they were fleeing oppression? The biblical themes of slavery and oppression in foreign exile are very strong in Isaiah 62. So are the themes of exodus, liberation, and restoration. All of us long to be no longer deserted and desolate especially in this dark time of Halloween
Pastor Ray Johnston of Bayside Church in Sacramento said recently: “If you expect the Christian life to be easy, you will quit when it gets hard.” Never let discouragement and loneliness cause you to give up. The devil, especially during Halloween, loves to exhaust us, isolate us, and distract us. That is one of the key ways he kills marriages, families, churches, and even nations.
You may notice how Bishop Peter talks a lot about the desert, how we are tempted to run away to the desert. Halloween, is one of those times when many believers feel spiritually deserted, when evil seems to be simultaneously glorified and trivialized. It can feel like a spiritual desert. That is why I encouraged you this October 31st to join us at 7pm at the All Saints prayer course. How many would agree that All Saints is an oasis in our BC desert?
In Isaiah 62, vs. 5, Israel and the grafted-in nations are told: “As a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”
Speaking of our new name Beulah, Jesus the Messiah is our bridegroom, and we are his covenantal bride. We are God’s trophy wife. He chose you before anyone could reject you or desert you. Are you married yet to Jesus? Marriage is sacramental and covenantal. God loves to use the sacraments of baptism and communion to help break off the curse of desertion, of abandonment, of god-forsakenness. Sacraments can be a great blessing when received by faith with thanksgiving, particularly during the Halloween season.
Would you like to be married to Jesus? The key, as Bishop Peter keeps telling us, is surrender. Have you surrendered your independence and your will to Jesus? You could do that this morning. As John Bevere, author of The Bait of Satan often says, many people however would rather date Jesus rather than forsake all others and be married to him alone. We love our idols too much to give them up. For many people, Halloween is a very powerful idol. It is unthinkable for many to renounce Halloween, even to just renounce the darker aspects of Halloween. They may think that they are being disloyal to their parents’ memories who may have taken them out trick or treating.
In Isaiah 62, vs 5, Jesus said: “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth.”
Bishop Peter is a watchman on the wall who is never silent sharing the good news and challenging people to turn from darkness. Our extended times of prayer at All Saints are time of the intercessors nightly watching on the wall. I am looking forward this evening to our latest nightly time of prayer as we are trusting God for our All Saints renovation. Let’s not give God or even ourselves any rest, especially during the gross darkness of Halloween. Did you know that spiritual renewal and restoration in Spanish is called renovacion?
Have you noticed that the darkness of Halloween is getting darker and bloodier? The Bible in Isaiah 60:2 talks about both darkness and gross darkness. While doorknocking, it sometimes looked like I have stumbled on an ISIS or Hamas massacre, strewn with decapitated bloody heads, hands and feet. God, by the way, is passionate about establishing and protecting Israel as the praise of the earth. Through passionate prayer, we can make a difference in protecting Israel from its many enemies. When prayerful revival breaks out as with the Jesus movement, that is when many Jewish people open their hearts to the Messiah Yeshua.
In Isaiah 62, vs 8-9, Israel and the grafted-in nations are told: “The Lord has sworn by his right hand and by his mighty arm: “Never again will I give your grain as food for your enemies, and never again will foreigners drink the new wine for which you have toiled; but those who harvest it will eat it and praise the Lord, and those who gather the grapes will drink it in the courts of my sanctuary.”
God’s desire is that both Israel and faithful nations experience biblical sowing and reaping. How many of us want more of the new wine and Harvest during this Halloween season? Surrender is the key to spiritual Harvest.
In Isaiah 62, vs 10, Jesus says to Israel and the grafted-in nations: “Pass through, pass through the gates! Prepare the way for the people. Build up, build up the highway! Remove the stones. Raise a banner for the nations.”
God is always calling the people of Israel home from exile. In Jesus, we are all being called home. Are you willing to come back home during the darkness of Halloween? What is holding you back from passing through the gates, from building up the highway for others getting free?
In Isaiah 62, vs. 11, Israel and the grafted-in nations are told: “The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth: “Say to Daughter Zion, ‘See, your Savior comes! See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him.’ ”
Israel’s greatest need is to realize that their Saviour Yeshua/ Jesus is coming again. All of us need this awareness. As we say in the liturgy, Christ had died. Christ had risen. Christ will come again. Jesus alone can save us from the gross darkness of Halloween. Are you willing to ask Jesus to save you this morning? What do you need saving from in your life?
In Isaiah 62, vs 12, Jesus speaks of Israel and the grafted-in nations: “They will be called the Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord; and you will be called Sought After, the City No Longer Deserted.”
Jesus is seeking for you as his Holy Redeemed City to choose the way of holiness, to say yes to the light and no to the bloody darkness. In this Halloween season, are you willing to die to some of your so-called rights that we Westerners take for granted? Once we surrender our will to the crucified Christ, we are crucified with Him. Every right we had was nailed to that cross. What rights are you willing to surrender, to lay on the altar? How about the right to be offended, the right to be bitter, the right to be angry, the right to hang onto unforgiveness, the right to criticize, how about even the right to be right? How about the right to do Halloween just like you have always done, no matter how dark it may get?
How many would like to no longer be deserted? What is God wanting to restore in your life even during the darkness of Halloween? How many want a restoration of your first love for Jesus? How many want a fresh assurance that God delights in you as his bride? I am convinced that in the increasingly bloody nature of Halloween, we need to be pleading the blood of Jesus, especially over our children and grandchildren. What can wash away Halloween? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make Canada whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Let us pray.
Edhird's Blog 