7th January 2026

CHANGE AND CHANGELESSNESS

What a world of change we live in. I find it remarkable that to send a letter by first-class post, even a short distance, costs £1.70, whereas an email can circuit the world for practically nothing. We may well be amongst the few who still use details of TV Channels to determine what we watch, rather than search a wide spectrum of programmes on iPlayer, Netflix etc. Increasingly we receive messages from family and friends that they have given up their landline telephone in favour of a smart phone and would we therefore note their new unmemorable number.

Reverting to the world I grew up in, I note that the family did not run a car, did not have a telephone or a television, nor a refrigerator or deep freeze: peas then came in pods not in ice. A hot tub or ‘copper’ and a hand-rotated mangle were the antecedents of the washing machine and central heating had not yet warmed our sometimes chilly homes.

Today we live with dramatic changes and can anticipate living in a world where ever greater changes can be expected: driverless cars, drone deliveries, new adventures in space travel, the human mind competing with AI.

Against all that we have to set the revelation of God, in time-specific scripture and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a particular place at a precise time which must always be the context of our understanding of what for us must be eternal truth. How are scientific advances parts of the coming of his kingdom? And what does it mean to pray ‘give us today our daily bread’ when we have many weeks of food awaiting our attention in our freezers? Or for that matter how do we get alongside that prayer prayed by peoples living with life-threatening famine? So well might we pray ‘Deliver us from evil.’

How important that we learn to relate a world of change to the world that the changeless God has given us, and which by his grace will be renewed when history has run its course.

John Briggs