Barbara Clapham came to live in London.  After two years she decided she was going to look for a church.  One Sunday morning she walked into our church and the lady who was welcoming people at the door smiled at her.  Barbara said that because of that smile, she decided to come back the following week.  When she walked in the next Sunday the same lady said, ‘Hello Barbara’. 

Goliath was a giant.  He was nine-feet tall, a champion, wearing heavy armour, standing and shouting, defying the people of God (1 Samuel 17:1–11).  As well as physical giants, there are metaphorical ones.  A ‘giant’ is a big, seemingly insurmountable problem or issue.  As the evangelist J John says, there are two possible attitudes when facing a giant.  One is to say, ‘He is so big, there’s nothing I can do’.  The other is to say ‘He’s so big, I can’t miss!’ 

You can finish well.  You may have had a bad start in life.  You may have messed up along the way.  You may have made mistakes.  You may have regrets.  But you can finish well and that is what matters most.

In February 1977, Bishop Festo Kivengere fled Uganda in fear for his life.  A few days previously he had been part of a group of church leaders who had delivered a letter of protest to the dictator, Idi Amin.  They had spoken out against the beatings, arbitrary killings and unexplained disappearances taking place across Uganda at the time.  The delegation had been led by Kivengere’s friend and leader, Archbishop Janani Luwum.  Within twenty-four hours of delivering the letter, Luwum had been killed, and Kivengere driven into hiding and then exile.

‘A glimpse of heaven’ is how one twenty-seven-year-old woman described her experience of our annual church holiday (Focus).  She also described the year she missed it in order to go on an exotic holiday: each day she could only think of how she longed to be at Focus.

Three years ago, David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood in the rose garden of 10 Downing Street announcing their plans for the first coalition government in Britain since World War II.  The birds sang and there was a great sense of optimism.  It reminded me of Margaret Thatcher’s speech outside 10 Downing Street in May 1979 when she quoted the famous prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi, ‘… where there is despair, may we bring hope’, and the sense of almost euphoria that accompanied the early days of Tony Blair’s premiership in 1997.

For 2,000 years, followers of Jesus have faced opposition.  In some of the countries Pippa and I have visited over the years Christians face physical persecution. 

‘This book is about the death of Christian Britain – the demise of the nation’s core religious moral identity’, writes Callum Brown in his book, The Death of Christian Britain.  ‘As historical changes go, this has been no lingering and drawn-out affair.  It took several centuries (in what historians used to call the Dark Ages) to convert Britain to Christianity, but it has taken less than forty years for the country to forsake it.’

Bernhard Langer was one of the best golfers of his generation.  In the mid-eighties he was at the top of the game, twice winning the US Masters and topping the inaugural world golf rankings in 1986.  He made a fortune and married an air stewardess from Florida.  He said: ‘I had … won seven events in five different continents; I was number one in the world and I had a beautiful young wife.  Yet there was something missing.

At the start of his influential book, Knowing God, JI Packer explores some of the big questions about life and the meaning and purpose of our existence.  He writes: