Good news for the countryside: A confidence that is unshakable
Every fortnight people from a farming background, or who have a heart for the countryside in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, offer a personal reflection on faith and rural life. They hope that you will be encouraged by it.
The Ulster Farmers’ Union has been a respected voice for farmers for many years. Therefore, when it adopts a position on a particular situation or issue, its view is always significant. The organisation’s recent dissatisfaction with, and lack of confidence, in the department responsible for farming and rural affairs, is a case in point.
Having confidence in a body that makes crucial decisions that have a deep impact on the lives of farmers is obviously very important. In the same way, there are things and people that we also need to have confidence in to feel secure. Most of all, if we are to enjoy satisfaction and contentment in life, we need to have confidence in the unfailing love and care of God.
When we turn to the Bible, we are reminded that there are things we should not put our confidence in for our spiritual well-being. Paul in Philippians 3:3 says this, “...we who serve God by His spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh.” Here, Paul articulates the danger of believers placing their confidence in the flesh.
But what is ‘the flesh’? The word ‘flesh’ in this context refers to any effort, achievement, or accomplishment outside of Christ. In other words, to have no confidence in the flesh is to completely depend on Christ and abandon placing confidence in our own works. It is to realise we cannot earn salvation by anything we do, but receive it as a free gift as we ask Christ to be our Saviour.
We encounter the word confidence again in the book of Hebrews, as the author speaks about the confidence that we can have in God hearing our cry for help.
Hebrews 4:16 encourages us to “…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.”
Through Jesus, Christians have access to God’s throne, which is a throne of grace, and through Jesus we can receive help in our time of need.
In the previous verses, the writer says that Jesus can sympathise with us because He was tempted in every way. He also described the Lord as a ‘high priest’ stressing how Jesus represents us before God.
It’s a story that began in Bethlehem, and soon we will enter the period of Advent when we focus on the coming of the Saviour. Jesus came to this world to bring hope to the hopeless and provide salvation to the lost. We can have confidence that His coming was planned by God from eternity to rescue sinners. We can have confidence that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross paid the debt of our sin.
We can have confidence that God will welcome into His family all who repent and turn to Jesus for salvation for He has promised us this, ‘for “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”’ (Romans 10:13.) And as we read in John 14:3, we can also have the confidence that Jesus will return again for His own.
The question for us to reflect on is this - where do we place our confidence for eternity? I trust that the answer will be that your confidence is found in Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross for our sin.
Having grown up in rural Tyrone, after leaving school at the age of 16, Knox worked for over 20 years on the family dairy farm near Aughnacloy. Having felt the call of God to full-time ministry, he was ordained in 2005 serving as minister of two Presbyterian congregations for 14 years. In 2019 he was called to be minister of Aghadowey and Crossgar Presbyterian Churches in County Londonderry.
If you would like to talk to someone about any of the issues raised in this article, please email Rev Kenny Hanna, PCI’s Rural Chaplain, at [email protected] or call him on 07938 488 372.