The Scripture Union Centre at Lendrick Muir played host to the Free Church of Scotland Youth Conference earlier this year. Once again, Solas had the privilege of taking part in the seminar streams which formed part of the Saturday programme. Around 180 young people, from late teens, students and folks in the early twenties came from the length and breadth of the country for an encouraging weekend of worship, fellowship, and teaching.
Our friend Andy Pearson the minister of St Peter’s Free Church in Dundee led the main teaching sessions, taking the young people through an engaging and thorough whistle-stop tour of the biblical Covenants which was great. The sung worship at the Free Church always inspires me – because in my church we regularly read the Psalms; but don’t sing them enough! Years ago when I did a degree course on the Psalms with the wonderful scholar Geoffrey Grogan, he insisted that we begin each class by singing a Psalm; ‘remember friends, these are lyrics’ he would say – before we set about analysing them. Hearing almost two hundred young people singing them with intense devotion and soaring harmonies was both beautiful and moving.
The young people had a choice of seminars to attend during the day and my one was entitled, “Sovereign God; Human Responsibility?” One of the dilemmas that we often face (have been asked about in Q&A’s and have written about on our website here) is that people sometimes think that God’s sovereignty means that we are in some way excused from the task of evangelism. In his great little book “Evangelism and Sovereignty of God”, J. I Packer tells the story of a young William Carey sharing his vision for taking the gospel to India and being rebuked by an older minister who said, “Sit down young man, God will save the heathen when he wants to, without your help or mine!” This is clearly a gross distortion of the biblical mandate for mission.
So, we looked together at how we should handle this issue more faithfully. In groups we studied scriptures which related to God’s sovereignty and to human responsibility – and summarised what we found. We then looked at some extreme ways people have sought to reconcile these, by undercutting one set of biblical truths or the other! And then at the way that Paul in the New Testament outworked it. In short, he gives us much of our New Testament theology of God’s sovereignty, but was radically, and self-sacrificially missional. If our lives don’t look like his, maybe we haven’t grasped his doctrine! Obviously as a Solas seminar, we focussed on evangelism – but the same principles apply to our prayer lives, our walk with The Lord, sanctification and building the church.
My hope and prayer is th
at the young people who came to this seminar will have left with a strong sense that it is the sovereignty of God which compels us, and empowers us to go forward in mission; confident that the ultimate victory is His and that He gives us real, meaningful and significant to work to do here – as He outworks His purposes.
