It’s always good to go Loch Leven Church in Kinross. The church there has been going formally for about six years, having emerged from a loose gathering of Christians in a home there- and a desire to do something new in the towns of Kinross and Milnathort. These towns are expanding with new housing springing up everywhere, and there is an appetite amongst Christians there for a new church to serve them. As well as speaking there for Solas, I have the honour of being an external trustee for LLC, seeking to work with them as they steer their path into become a mature church – with all the joys, setbacks, triumphs and challenges which that inevitablhy entails.
One one recent Sunday I was there, and gave the church a prayer update for the work of Solas. There are lots of faithful people at LLC who pray for our work – so it was great to encourage them with a few snapshots from the frontline of our work.
I then had the opportunity to preach for them, from Matthew 4. They are using the book, “Fly Through The BIble” and doing an overview of key texts in the Old and New Testaments. The section we had on Sunday was ‘The Temptation of Jesus’. It’s true that in this text Jesu shows us how to resist temptation, and he sets us a perfect exmaple to emulate in terms of using scripture as a weapon and resisting the devil. All true. However, if we only preach that text as a ‘how to’ and a ‘you must’ text then we fall substatially short of the New Testament’s emphasis.
Hebrews 4 says:
14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven,[f] Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
So we looked at three things together. Firstly Christ is our example to emulate in resisting sin. Secondly he is our caring, symapthetic high priest when we are in the midst of the battle with sin. Thirdly though, he resisted temptation, and was therefore completley pure and able to save us from sins we have already committed. Unlike him, we have often fallen for temptation, so (in Old Testament imagery) need a pure and spotless, unblemished ‘lamb’ to die in our place to atone for our sins. In other words – because Jesus resisted tempation there is hope for all of us who haven’t! Our sins might be open rebellion against God, or they might be pride and religious hypocrisy. Either way, Christ can set us free – because he alone wasn’t guilty of either.
So, it was lovely to renew fellowship with all the good folks at LLC, and to share in worship, fellowship and partnership in the gospel with them all. LLC are good friends of Solas and we do enjoy working with them!
