Straight to the Heart

As I write this, riot police are gathering outside Queens Road Church in response to a tip off that the rioting and looting is going to spread to Wimbledon tonight. I’ve just been walking amongst the gathered policemen and felt the strange sense of fear which has gripped London over recent nights.

News reporters and politicians have been shocked and surprised by the sudden outbreak of violence, arson and theft, but God hasn’t. He predicted in 2 Timothy 3 that “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” Many of us are just waking up to what it looks like when a city turns its back on God in pursuit of self-worship and of greed. As far as God is concerned, London has been in riot for many years.

So many Christians are asking how they should respond, and many non-Christians are looking to the church for some answers. I would like to suggest three things which we all need to remember as we watch London burning and being looted on the news.

1. Remember that the Devil hates London.

If you remember this, it will help you make sense of the anarchy. When Jesus told us in John 10:10 that the Devil “comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” he really meant it. The Devil is like Professor Moriarty, the arch-criminal of London, as Sherlock Holmes describes him in the short story ‘The Final Problem’: “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” Most of the time, the Devil tries to hide in the shadows and work in secret across our city. When he steps out into the open, like this week, it need not be a bad thing if it stirs the People of God to wake up and to pray. It doesn’t matter if Satan does his worst if it stirs God’s People to do their best, and if it helps us…

2. Remember that God loves London

This is the city where the Gospel was rediscovered and championed by reformers in the sixteenth century. This is the city which sent more missionaries out to the nations of the world with the Gospel than virtually any other. This is the city of William Booth and his Salvation Army revival which spread all across the world. This is the city of the Alpha Course which God has used to reach hundreds of thousands across the world for Christ. You may look at burning London and assume God has finished with this city. I encourage you to look at this city’s history with God and to think again.

One historian of London in the early 1700s describes the situation in those days: “Robbers and murderers abounded. Gangs of drunken ruffians paraded the streets and subjected women to nameless outrages and defenceless men to abominable tortures … It seemed as if the whole population were given over to an orgy of drunkeness, which made the very name of Englishmen stink in the nostrils of other nations … Crimes of violence multiplied on every hand.” Yet when Christians began praying and imploring God to save their city, they discovered his great love for London all along. John Wesley was able to write in his letters in 1738: “In London … there is a general awakening and multitudes are crying out, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ … The word of the Lord runs and is glorified, and his work goes on and prospers. Great multitudes are everywhere awakened and cry out, ‘What must we do to be saved?’”

3. Remember that Jesus will save many in this city.

Psalm 2 describes a conversation between God the Father and Jesus the Son: “He said to me, ‘You are my Son … Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.” Jesus has decided to save many Londoners as part of his plan to save people from every nation, and he has asked God the Father to turn this city back to him - either willingly through gentle coaxing, or by shaking it out of its complacent sleep. God the Father has promised to answer Jesus’ prayer. Let’s not panic. Let’s keep adding our own prayers to those of Jesus.

At the end of Revelation 2, Jesus turns to his church and tells us that the promise of Psalm 2 belongs to us as well as him. He tells us to pray for London as it reels from rioting and looting - with a promise that will use the Devil’s worst to bring about his best plans for our city.