Two months had passed since the awful events of 5 February 1997. Someone had tossed a hand-scribbled anti-Islamic slur into a little mosque that bordered a canal near the Christian village of Shanti Nagar in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. No one saw who did it but within seconds the mosques' loudspeakers were urgently summonsing a meeting of the village's young men. Someonme claimed that some pages from a Quran had been burned, or ripped out, or insults against their prophet scribbled in the margins - immediately the finger was pointed at the Christians since obviously no Moslem would desecrate their holy book. The news spread like wildfire and within the hour all the mosques in the region were broadcasting calls for local Moslems to teach the Christian villages roundabout a lesson they would never forget.

With the efficiency of a carefully executed operation, the town of Khanewal, 50 miles east of the city of Multan, became the place where the mob assembled. Rumours and accusations mushroomed like the plume of a nuclear explosion. A police officer reported that Christians were making alcohol and selling it to Moslems. Others said that their prophet had been blasphemed. And now they had desecrated a copy of the Quran. With each new accusation, the mob's anger grew into an uncontrollable rage.

It wasn't long before a crowd of about 30,000 Moslems began to march towards the Christian villages. A local police officer, using a megaphone, pleaded for them to turn back. The plea was ignored. The Catholic and Anglican Churches of Khanewal were torched. Stacks of Bibles and hymnbooks were tossed into a pile by the altar of each of them and burned. The mob gathered again but this time with rocks, knives and guns and began a determined march towards the village of Shanti Nagar. Some even had grenades, Molotov cocktails and incendiary chemicals. Word spread fast: 'Destroy buildings and property only. We will not kill the infidels this time. We will teach them a lesson they won't forget.' By the time the rampage had ended the next morning, 15,000 Christians had lost their homes and property - cattle, fruit trees, wheelbarrows, tractors and bicycles were all destroyed.

It could have been worse. In other places and in other Moslem countries rape, torture, kidnapping of girls and murder often accompanies such mob actions. And not only in Moslem lands, but mostly in the countries where the 'Religion of Peace' prevails. We see the first signs of similar happenings in our own Western lands on a smaller scale - crazed killers cutting up 'infidels' with knives in public spaces, ploughing through Sunday markets in cars and running pedestrians down, even the occasional street beheading. Such a beheading took place here in an Ikea warehouse about 1½ hours away from us. Worse, the politicians are too craven and weak to do anything about it other than to make laws that penalise the 'infidels' in order to appease the 'Peace-Religionists'. You know it. It's happening on our own streets now. There are zones in some of our cities which are de facto controlled by the adherents of this so-called 'Religion of Peace'. And we can all feel the growing resentment and outrage of the indigenous of the population both against these extremists and our incompetent and cowardly politicians who in some cases are even imprisoning those who protest this religions grooming gangs and murderers.

You may be wondering what on earth this all has to do with Yom haBikkurim, the Day of Firstfruits, or Resurrection Day, which we have gathered together today to celebrate. You have not heard me start a sermon on the central historical event of our faith like this before. You were no doubt expecting me to launch into a traditional celebration of the event of all history that has given mankind such hope for a better future and world to come. And you shall. But this year is different. This year is a year of new beginnings and sometimes new beginnings have to get off to a shocking start. Sometimes we have to be shaken and woken up out of our complacency before Yahweh can do a 'new thing' with us. That, at any rate, is the clear witness of history.

But back to our story if I may. Bear with me because there is a surprise ending. You see, the devastation of Shatinagar was total, and the Christian community wasn't the only one that suffered from the blind hatred of the mob. One store had foodstuffs scattered on the floor. Ashes and shards of rupee notes floated in the breeze. A metal rolltop door was bent from the fire, horribly distorted. The Shatinagar Clinic was a shell. Next to it stood a scorched ambulance, its tyres melted by the heat. Every church had been destroyed. One was simply a pile of charred bricks, another had scorched walls but no roof, and in a third smashed sound equipment was littered among the charred and twisted seats. A Bible, with singed pages, lay open at Psalm 82. Birds perched on the blackened iron beams of another church building. Next to the Full Gospel Assembly was a van sitting on charred wheel rims. These fires has clearly burned exceedingly hot. One church building was still burning, flames pouring out the roof.

The scenes at the homes was even worse. Not one had been spared. The entire community had been wiped out, the work of years of financial sacrifice, hard work and love. Children stood around dazed, a woman sifted through a pile of burned books but nothing was salvageable. The mob had made sure of that. You get the picture. An old man stood gazing at the destruction, too stunned to show any grief just yet. It had all happened so suddenly.

But within the hour these hapless villagers soon learned they were not alone. A van drove in with the markings of a church from another village filled with blankets. Other carts and cars arrived throughout the day. The surrounding Christian community from all denominations was responding with food, water and warm clothing for the nights there are cold and everyone would have to sleep outdoors. But at least no one would go to sleep cold or hungry that night.

Persecution brings believers from all denominations together and for a while there are no divisions. They are one community united by love, concern and care. It is only in prosperity and peace that Christians get casual and careless, erecting barriers to one another. Somehow all the essentials of the faith are pushed to the forefront in such a tragedy and all the divisions are seen to be, for the most part, irrelevent to life. Such will happen here in the West and we will see similar scenes, and you will be greatly surprised who you will see as first responders to the needs of the persecuted Body. It happened in communist countries. I have told you about how seemingly irreconcilable differences were forgotten by disparate denominations in communist Romania, from Eastern Orthodox to Jehovah's Witnesses and every group inbetween, as they came together for prayer and for mutual support and comfort. Crisis did not resolve the theological differences but it did get believers to the place where it mattered the most: a shared love of Yah'shua (Jesus) and a shared love of people. In the midst of suffering and despair, the Two Great Commandments rose, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of adversity as overacrhing everything else but...let's be realistic...also Yahweh's chastisement.

The events that took place at Shanti Nagar in the Pakistani Pubjab were indeed terrible and violent but there was at least no bloodshed, I have spared you the details of other attacks by the 'Religion of Peace' on Christian communities around the world because I don't want violence to be the main focus of today's message. Yom haBikkurim is a joyful day, a day of celebration, but that does not mean we have to ignore the reality of the world around us. Two months later, organised by national Christian leaders, a tent was set up for a meeting with community elders. The commissioner of the Salvation Army, which had founded the village 80 years before, was joined by local pastors. But there weren't only Christians there. Other delegates included the District Commissioner (a Moslem), the Bishop of Sialkot, and the retired Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court (also a Moslem). The speaker, invited for the occasion, was the Dutch evangelist whom many of you will know as 'Brother Andrew' of Bible-smuggling fame during the communist era.

An investigation revealed that the riot had all begun when three Moslem police officers arrested a Christian and ripped up his Bible. This caused the Christian community to protest leading to the officers' suspension for two weeks. Though it was never proven, it was widely believed that these three men had started the false accusation about a Christian ripping pages out of the Quran when it had been them ripping the pages out of a Bible. There may be more to it than that, of course, which we may never know about, but the source was undoubtedly a false accusation.

You need to know that not all Moslems are fundamentalists. I know, I grew up in a Moslem country, Malaysia, and we had many Moslem friends. I still do to this day. Yesterday I told you how Platonism has seeped into Christianity by a process of cultural osmosis over the centuries, subtly changing the tone and flavour of the original Gospel message, giving us what might be termed 'orthodox Christianity' (Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox). By this means Christianity first became Hellenised and then Romanised. Something similar happened to Islam when Christians came to Africa and Asia as colonisers, bringing with them their orthodox Christian culture, in the case of Britain, an Anglican culture, in the case of France, Span, Portugal and others, a Roman Catholic culture. This filtered into the indigenous Islamic society by cultural osmosis, transforming Islam into what one might call 'moderate Islam' though technically there is no such thing - there is one (fundamentalist) Islam and there are moderate Moslems and fundamentalist, extremist Moslems, the latter living strictly by the tenets of their holy book, the Haddith and other Islamic writings.

The government representative at the tent meeting in Shanti Nagar, Justice Nasim Hassan Shah, you could well describe as a 'moderate Moslem' (like our friends in Malaysia were) leavened somewhat by Western Christian ethics and morality, though I am sure he would, if he is still alive, disavow such a connection for understandble political reasons. But in essence what he said was this: "I want you to know we are very upset over what has happened here. The Christian community has been disgraced. We must do something to restore their confidence."

When Pakistan became independent from Britain in 1947 at the same time as India, the flag chosen for it was Islamic green with the traditional Islamic emblems of a white crescent moon and star in the centre. But to this flag, along the hoist, was added a white vertical stripe to signify the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities to indicate that they too had a place in the Pakistani community. India did the same thing, including a green stripe to represent the many Moslems remaining in that land even after partition, a white stripe for the Christians, and a wheel emblem representing the Buddhists. The upper stripe of the horizontal tricolour was orange for the majority Hindu peoples. Again, the idea was inclusiveness in the community. That was the ideal of both countries, an ideal both have strayed from, the more so in the western part of that divided subcontinent. The Pakistani Supreme Court Justice in attendance at that tent meeting represented that ideal to be sure even though he must have felt uneasy knowing that moderate Moslems are as much targeted by extremists as other religions like Christianity.

The objective of the fundamentalists was plain enough: to create a reason, a 'red-flag' event, if you like, to destroy all the Christians in the region and drive Christianity away for good. The fear of the moderates was reflected in that tent being surrounded with soldiers armed with machine guns to protect the assembly. Imagine, if you will (using that gift Yahweh gave you that we spoke of yesterday too) youself in that tent. You have just been through the horror I just described to you. You can imagine their feelings having lost absolutely everything short of their lives. Imagine if everything you owned and had built up over a lifetime, and that of your parents and grandparents had been destroyed at the same time too, in a single, senseless rampage. That is not hard to imagine. Imagine you are a parent who has sweated and toiled to leave a legacy for your children only to have it all wiped out in an hour. How should these people respond? Imagine yourself visiting there from your comfortable home in the West to speak to them. What would you say, remembering there were Moslems present? What words would you have said to bring healing and restoration to that shattered community? I'll tell you what Brother Andrew did.

He began by reading the Beattitudes in Matthew, chapter 5, also called by some 'the beautiful attitudes' because they teach us a right attitude toward others and life in general...I like that. I'll not read them all to you now but invite you to take a look at them sometime today as part of your Yom haBikkurim meditations because I do believe they are the sign of the New Birth by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) in their full ripening, remembering that these attitudes take time to habituate. We're going to look at just three verses, 10, 11 & 12, in the New King James Version (NKJV). We'll start with the first two, which I call the 'passive verses':

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake" (Mt.5:10-11, NKJV).

"Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the nevi'im (prophets) who were before you" (Mt.5:12, NKJV).

When you have just been persecuted, or are still being persecuted, 'rejoicing and being exceedingly glad' are the last things you want to do. I know, I have failed many, many times in the past during times of persecution, and that was mild compared to what these Pakistani Christians went through. It was mostly my character, honour and reputation that were under assualt, but that deeply hurt no less.

To therefore rejoice and be very happy is beyond any shadow of a doubt a change in attitude but it's not something we can do in our own strength. The fleshy nature rebels violently at such a proposition! I get it, been there, done that, more times than I would care to admit. The thing is, when you have Christ in you - and you can only get 'Christ in you' by fully yielding and trusting in Him, and when you have become renewed by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit), you not only absolutely can rejoice and be happy, but you are commanded to be. I do not say this flippantly or lightly. I know the struggle. And you can only have the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) in you because of the glorious resurrection of our Messiah! You can only do this because of what we are honouring and celebrating today: Christ physically rising from the dead and living forever. And whilst our own resurrection day hasn't happened yet, and won't until Yah'shua (Jesus) returns, we have been given a portion of resurrection power here and now through our trusting in, and fully surrendering to, Messiah Yah'shua (Christ Jesus). We've been given a downpayment.

May I suggest some simple steps to making this divine attitude a reality without any sort of pretense? For we don't want to fake it, do we? First of all, if we believe in Christ and what He says (as we must do if we are true believers), then what have we to complain about if adversity strikes us as it did those hapless Pakistani Christians from Shanti Nagar? That's the first point. The second follows on from that: how do we possible arrive at such an attitude of not complaining?? It's an honest question and we have every right to ask it. Well, the answer is in the 6th chapter of Matthew where Yah'shua (Jesus) gives us the tavnith or pattern for perfect prayer. Do you remember the part which is a plea we make for personal forgiveness for our own sins? Notice, very importantly, that this plea is not made on the basis of atonement (what price has to be paid to be forgiven) but on the basis of reciprocity:

"Forgive us our sins just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us" (Mt.6:12, NLT)

"...forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" (Mt.6:12, NKJV).

When Brother Andrew read out these words to the tent assembly of Christian victims and some Moslem officials in Shanti Nagar, people started sitting up straight! He read on in verses 14 & 15:

"For if you forgive men their trespasses (sins, indebtedness), your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses (sins, indebtedness), neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (sins, indebtedness)" (Mt.6:14-15, NKJV).

What would you have been thinking of had you been one of the vistims in that audience hearing these words? I can imagine a reaction being something like this: "You ask too much of us. We've lost everything! And besides, whilst one or two Moslem leaders have expressed shame for the behaviour of those who rioted, no one has actually asked us for forgiveness!! How can we forgive if no one asks to be forgiven??"

No human philosophy can possibly answer that question. Just ask a non-believer what their response would be in a similar situation, without mentioning that the victims were specifically Christians. Today's woke culture response to injustice is the diametric opposite to the Christian one. And what is that? Revenge. Cancellation. Compensation. Where do we look for the answer to injustice and persecution? THE CROSS. While Yah'shua (Jesus) was hanging on the cross, He prayed: "Father, forgive them" (Lk.23:34). There was no one in that angry mob, watching the Saviour die, who even thought about asking forgiveness. Nevertheless, Yah'shua (Jesus) offered it. This is the Derech (Way) of our Messiah. By offering forgiveness, He removes the barrier between a sinful people and a loving, forgiving and giving Elohim (God). That's not normally our approach. We demand that a person who harmed us first crawl in the dust and beg for forgiveness.

The resurrection empowers us to do that. And remember, our own forgiveness is conditional upon our forgiving those who wrong us, whether the sins against us are real or imagined. If we refuse to forgive, we remain in our sins in spite of the atonement, for that is THE condition for any of us being forgiven, set free and being 'heaven-bound'. Reciprocity. There is no other way! We dare not ignore this because it is fundamental to our faith. If we don't believe this, or reject it as impossible, then we are not Christian. We aren't even saved. What is the cost we must pay (and, yes, there is a 'payment' of sorts)? One thing only: our pride. Period. Full stop. That's the only cost to us. And contrary to what the world tells you, pride is not only a handicap it is, in reality, the spirit of murder, because this is what caused Heylel or Lucifer to fall and become Satan, the liar and murderer. It was a misguided pride that caused that mob to be so offended and enraged and do what it did. The next step would have been more than arson - it would have been murder.

Don't get me wrong here, I am not saying that all kinds of pride are bad. I am speaking of the classical definition of pride, which is an undue or undeserved high opinion of ones own qualities or merits which leads to arrogant bearing or conduct. I am excluding that sense of 'pride' one feels when one experiences satisfaction with a job well done, and it's unfortunate that we use 'pride' in that way toot. No, the pride I am speaking of is best represented by the Hebrew word ga'avah which means to be 'high, exalted or haughty'. To have an unduly high opinion of oneself. Arrogance.

Brother Andrew finished his speech in Shanti Nagar by saying: "We offer those Moslems who have committed this crime forgiveness". Justice Shah and the other Moslem leaders assembled in that tent were astonished and deeply moved. The chief justice later asked a bishop at the meeting for a copy of his sermon "because I have never heard this," he said. "I want to read it again."

Many Moslems - but not just Moslems, peoples of every belief system and none - are brought to Christ and His salvation through experiencing the power of forgiveness, because without knowing it, they are being privileged to get a foretaste of what resurrection is all about. Now for those particular Moslems in Shanti Nagar, more than words is required to enter the stream of forgiveness themselves, but it was a staart. We don't have to immediately feel the height and depth of the pain those we have wronged who are forgiving us feel - that's Yah'shua's (Jesus') business - but we are expected to interact with that pain and suffering at some point for it to properly work through us. How much or how little I cannot say, nor would I dare speculate. What I do know is that to verbally (or in written format) forgive (verbal is better), and to mean it, is enough, and the one whose forgiveness is being sought is duty bound to give it. Trust me, processes are unleased in a soul who forgives that will continue to do their work for the rest of his life, for the good. Just trust that. Say it, mean it, build bridges if you can or move on. The real depth of suffering Christ knows and that is enough - He knows is so throughly that He experienced your pain on the cross. Trust that.

Forgiveness is the power that can truly change the world and is one of the greatest incidental evangelistic tools that there is. The Shanti Nagar story does not end there. Today that village has been rebuilt and a beautiful building stands in its midst. The son of the late Zia ul-Haq, a former President of Pakistan, was joined by Chief Justice Shah and other dignitaries for the dedication of what would become a library and community centre for the whole area. That building was named the 'Prince of Peace Library'. Many adults within the area have learned to read and write within its walls.

I had intended this to be a short 15 minute message but you know me well by now. I wanted to do something different today. I have waxed eloquent on the theology of the physical resurrection in times past and didn't feel the need to do so again. We have different needs this year. It is a year of new beginnings and it seemed right to me, and the Ruach (Spirit), that we focus on the miracle of forgiveness. If it is a wonderful feeling to be forgiven, is it right that we should deny others that blessing by denying it to them when Christ commands to so do? If anyone here has issues of unforgiveness that need resolving, then may I urge you to go and settle them right away - or as soon as possible? It's such a millstone around our necks to have failed to forgive whether forgiveness has been asked of us or not, it doesn't matter. I for one want to be right with Yahweh at this new year time and I know I cannot be until I have forgiven those who have wronged me in the past. Clear the air in your own soul, in your families, and in all your relationships with others. Let that be your chief spring-cleaning this biblical year!

I would like, in the next day or two, for us to see the movie, Amish Grace again as some of you may not have seen it before or have forgotten it. It's the true story of the murder of five Amish children by a gunman and the injuring of many more in a Pennsylvanian schoolhouse. It's a deeply moving story about forgiveness and compassion shown by a grieving mothet who has lost her child. It is worth having a copy of this movie as it is a tremendoubsly powerful testament to the power of forgiveness.

In the meantime, may the grace of our Master Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) be with you over the next few days of Chag haMatzah as we mediate on all these important things. We will assemble again at the end of the festival in five days time. See you then. Amen.

Acknowledgements