Sometimes drivers take a wrong turning and find themselves drivng towards a dead end. Yes, even in the age of sat-navs. Indeed, some accounts suggest that sat-navs have made the problem worse, with drivers ending up in fields, streams and all sorts of rather unsuitable places for motor vehicles.
My car is a sat-nav-free zone, but all the same. there have been times when I have had to say to myself, "John, you've taken a wrong turning. You've got to turn round and go back." I hate doing this. It feels like an admission of defeat, but what choice do you have when you're going in totally the wrong direction?
I mention this after reading an interesting article by Andrew Rawnsley in last Sunday's Observer about UKIP's likely impact on the local government elections. He mentioned the surprise of a senior party strategist at the commensts of sojme UKIP voters in a focus group. They "spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: 'The past.' The rest of the group nodded in agreement."
It's easy to depict not just UKIP voters but Christians too as backward-looking people who are out of place in the modern world and wish to return to some mythical golden age. On this blog, I have pointed out that Britain's heritage industry is thriving, and that one of the reasons why people are drawn to steam locomotives, for example, is that they symbolise a gentler, less frenetic age.
However, there is another side to this. We have departed from God's laws as a nation in the last 50 years, and the result is the mess that we see all around us - broken homes, soaring teenage pregnancies, abortion, bloated debt-laden government, omnipresent CCTV, subjection to the EU and so on. Is it surprising that peole are unhappy about the state of Britain today? Furthermore, what does one do in such circumstances? Just carry on ploughing the same furrow? I hope not. "More of the same" is not an option for reviving our nation. There has to be a national repentance - an admission that the sat-navs of socialism and secular humanism have guided us towards a brick wall. We need to turn round and turn back to God - back to the guidelines laid out in the Bible for running a nation. As I explained in my book Providence, Piety and Power, these guidelines are part of God's gift of providence - blessings to be enjoyed by believer and unbeliever alike. I doubt if most - let alone all- of those members of the UKIP focus group who felt so saddened by the state of our country today were Evangelical believers, but perhaps subconsciously they would have identified with the statements of Hosea the prophet who saw his nation taking a disastrous wrong turning some 750 years before Christ. "They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind." Israel of old failed to heed the warnings. It would not take a u-turn and the nation was invaded by the Assyrians. Let us pray that our country will not suffer the same fate.
My car is a sat-nav-free zone, but all the same. there have been times when I have had to say to myself, "John, you've taken a wrong turning. You've got to turn round and go back." I hate doing this. It feels like an admission of defeat, but what choice do you have when you're going in totally the wrong direction?
I mention this after reading an interesting article by Andrew Rawnsley in last Sunday's Observer about UKIP's likely impact on the local government elections. He mentioned the surprise of a senior party strategist at the commensts of sojme UKIP voters in a focus group. They "spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: 'The past.' The rest of the group nodded in agreement."
It's easy to depict not just UKIP voters but Christians too as backward-looking people who are out of place in the modern world and wish to return to some mythical golden age. On this blog, I have pointed out that Britain's heritage industry is thriving, and that one of the reasons why people are drawn to steam locomotives, for example, is that they symbolise a gentler, less frenetic age.
However, there is another side to this. We have departed from God's laws as a nation in the last 50 years, and the result is the mess that we see all around us - broken homes, soaring teenage pregnancies, abortion, bloated debt-laden government, omnipresent CCTV, subjection to the EU and so on. Is it surprising that peole are unhappy about the state of Britain today? Furthermore, what does one do in such circumstances? Just carry on ploughing the same furrow? I hope not. "More of the same" is not an option for reviving our nation. There has to be a national repentance - an admission that the sat-navs of socialism and secular humanism have guided us towards a brick wall. We need to turn round and turn back to God - back to the guidelines laid out in the Bible for running a nation. As I explained in my book Providence, Piety and Power, these guidelines are part of God's gift of providence - blessings to be enjoyed by believer and unbeliever alike. I doubt if most - let alone all- of those members of the UKIP focus group who felt so saddened by the state of our country today were Evangelical believers, but perhaps subconsciously they would have identified with the statements of Hosea the prophet who saw his nation taking a disastrous wrong turning some 750 years before Christ. "They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind." Israel of old failed to heed the warnings. It would not take a u-turn and the nation was invaded by the Assyrians. Let us pray that our country will not suffer the same fate.