Highland International Church are great friends of Solas, and I am the third Solas speaker to have had the joy of going there and sharing the gospel up in Inverness. On this occasion the church were holding an Easter service and several people who were not yet Christians came in from the surrounding community; including some who are in the middle of the Hope Explored course that the church is running – and are really investigating the Christian faith for themselves.
The church meets in Raigmore Community Centre in Inverness – and I was amazed to learn that when they planted the church there a few years ago, they were the only Christian church ever to have been in the estate since the council built it in the 1960s! It’s wonderful that after almost fifty years the thousands of people there now have a church which is active in sharing the hope that only Jesus brings, with them.
I was there on Good Friday and was asked to speak about, “What’s So Good About Good Friday?” – a question I was once asked by a youngster who thought that the death of Christ sounded like anything but ‘good’! Using John Stott’s famous phrase we looked at the way in which Jesus’s death overcomes three things for us: The penalty of sin, the pollution of sin and the power of sin – and what that means. Our reading from scripture ended with the story of the two thieves who were crucified each side of Christ on the first Good Friday. Both were presented with the same evidence, both saw the same Jesus, heard the same words – but one was saved and one lost. One put his faith in Christ and was saved, the other rejected him and was lost. So – I left the folks there with the observation that proximity to Jesus, or his church, isn’t enough; we each must cry out to him for salvation and forgiveness.
That night, battling an unseasonally late snow fall over Slochd Summit on the A9 on my way home, I reflected on what a privilege it is to share the gospel with people; and to share in that work with folks like James Torrens and Highland International Church!
