When the word got round that we were not going to have an Advent Carol Service this year , the reaction of a certain individual was something along these lines...”Oh bliss!”

Advent Sunday is next Sunday and Christmas fever has truly kicked in already. Yet Advent is an incredibly serious time of the Church’s year; it’s a penitential time, and that’s why our Advent hymns are pretty awful, far from reflecting what we have come to know as the joy of Christmas-time, Advent actually reminds us of our fallenness, and our Churches turn from green to the sombre purple. It’s one reason why Advent hymns aren’t so popular, and if you were being very liturgically correct, you wouldn’t actually sing a carol until Christmas Day. That would make the lead up to Christmas rather dismal in Church, to say the least. But that is why we have such penitential times before the two great celebrations of the Church’s year, Christmas and Easter, to remind us of why Jesus had to come at all!

Just look at our Gospel reading for today – it’s actually about the crucifixion; Jesus is before Pilate and he is about to be crucified and he states in front of Pilate, “for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” And, in a way it is a shame, the official reading for today leaves out the next verse in John 18 which has Pilate retort, “what is truth?” Isn’t that a great question? You can just imagine the scene so easily. It is so dramatic, “What is truth?”

This scene is recorded in all four gospels. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus answers the question put to him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” quite emphatically, “Yes, it is as you say.” But in John’s Gospel, there is more of a conversation; “Is that your idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?” and eventually, Jesus replies in verse 37, “You are right in saying I am a king”.

When Jesus was crucified, Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek. The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, “Do not write ‘The King of the Jews’, but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” I have just read out John 19 verses 19 to 22. Clearly, Pilate believed him to be whom Jesus claimed to be

We are constantly asked to make decisions on all sorts of topics, at work, of course, but also at home and even with our faith. But all of these decisions are ‘informed’ decisions; there are never decisions made in a complete vacuum. Decisions about the person of Christ are crucial to our faith and why we bother to come to Church at all. Again, these kind of decisions are not made in a vacuum; they are measured, they are conclusive and they are not decisions made on ‘blind faith’. What kind of idiot would make a decision on blind faith? As a Christian, that is not what you are required to do.

Confirmation is very much on our minds these days and when Charlie grows up a bit, he will be asked to ‘confirm’ the vows and promises which are made on his behalf today. He will be asked to confirm his belief in Christ as King and as Lord

If Alpha, all those years ago, taught us anything, it was who Christ is. Its first session is entitled, “Who is Jesus?” It systematically sets out his historicity, his direct and indirect claims about himself, his effect and all the so-called external ‘evidence’. Any one of these bits of ‘evidence’ is enough to tell you that all of it... is true! And that’s a wonderful realisation to arrive at.

Would you believe, in the United States, a congressman once publicly criticized the Department of Agriculture for wasting taxpayer’s money printing useless pamphlets. According to the congressman, they printed pamphlets about “everything except the love life of the frog.”

Following the congressman’s speech, the Department of Agriculture began to receive orders for ‘The Love Life of the Frog’. As more and more orders arrived, the department eventually had to make a public statement announcing emphatically that no such pamphlet existed.

After the public denial, letters requesting ‘The Love Life of the Frog’ began to arrive by the hundreds. Finally, the Secretary of Agriculture, in a national address, stated that the department had never printed such a pamphlet and had no intention of doing so

Following the broadcast, thousands of orders for the pamphlet arrived in the mail

In a way, I’d like to think that the American public decided to take the mickey a bit and just jump on the band wagon, but I doubt it somehow. The public had decided that such a paper existed, that it was true, and that they wanted a copy; for what reason I cannot imagine

When you consider what people believe on the slightest of evidence or even suggestion, isn’t it amazing they cannot sometimes believe what the New Testament is all about

You look at the evidence, scriptural and non-scriptural, from history and from philosophy, and then we can have a proper debate. But never dismiss the Kingship of Christ just out of hand. Look at the evidence, and you cannot conclude anything other than Christ is King and He is Lord.