Dear Everyone,

I have approached Christmas 2009 as none other. Being so close to death this year I have learned something of the incredible experience it is to have the Lord Jesus so near. After so many weeks in an isolation ward and now having just received my 7th round of Chemo I found myself having the most moving opportunity last week to speak to 2,000 people over two evenings at the Ulster Hall in Belfast on the occasion of two Christmas Concerts entitled Ireland in Christmas Praise.

I was approached the Music Director of the New Irish Choir and Orchestra, Jonathan Rea and given the opportunity of being interviewed by him on the two evenings about my journey of faith across this roller-coaster year. Not being allowed to stay for long in crowds due to infection risk Margaret got me in through the Stage Door and them I got on to the Stage for five minutes while Jonathan talked with me. Earlier I had written a Carol and Jonathan had composed beautiful music to it and following the interview the Choir and Orchestra presented the Carol to the audience.

The Carol’s background is that I was walking one day in a wood near Siloam Springs, Arkansas. The wood was on the estate of the Christian Card Company, Dayspring Cards who are owned by Hallmark. I had been put up in one of their apartments in the wood by John Brown University where I was ministering during that particular week. Dayspring had tastefully erected a few appropriate texts on trees around a well laid out, mile long, Prayer Walk in the woods. I had recently viewed a Christmas movie called Polar Express starring Tom Hanks. I found it often charming and full of some excellent moral lessons for children. My problem with the movie was that when the little boy got to the North Pole after quite a train journey he met Santa Claus who was written so large I suddenly thought ‘they have made him into a god.’ There was no mention in the film of the One whom Christmas remembers. Zilch. I began to muse on how our Western culture has lost in-depth consideration of the stupendous truth of the Incarnation. Millions of people now don’t believe it is true.

So I got down on my knees by a tree in that wood and asked the Lord to give me something to write about the Incarnation. Eventually a Carol surfaced and I muse this Christmas on the Lord’s gracious answer to my prayers in that wood as he lifted up my head to speak again in public in the context of the Carol he empowered me to write. The words are as follows:

From Behind The Sun

Again Lord by the Spirit’s power,
We’d capture the wonder of the hour,
When Deity stooped down to possess
A little infant child, no less,
In Bethlehem.

Lord we would seek to comprehend
That you, the beginning and the end,
Creator of stars and galaxies
Could lie in Mary’s arms at ease,
In Bethlehem.

We thrill O Lord to see you come,
The Light from far behind the Sun,
To lighten our despairing world
As grace upon grace unfurled,
In Bethlehem.

For God so loved the world he gave
His only Son our souls to save,
And now with worship unconcealed
We gaze at Glory gently veiled,
In Bethlehem.

(Words:D. Bingham, Music: J.Rea © 2009 Bingham/Rea www.newvoicemusic.com)
 
It was Charles Williams, an ‘inkling’ with CS Lewis at Oxford who famously wrote of the Incarnation that it was ‘A light
that shone from behind the sun; the sun was not so fierce as to pierce where that light could.’ Lewis quotes him in his book Miracles (Collins/Fount paperbacks, 1977) in a chapter entitled ‘The Grand Miracle’ on the subject of the Incarnation. Here Lewis teaches that the power of the great to enter the little is almost the test of it greatness. It is a thing seen all over the world. The seed falls into the ground and new life re-ascends. The full organisms descend into the spermatozoon and ovum and in the dark womb the perfect embryo ascends to the baby and finally the adult. So the Incarnation: the God of infinity becomes so small you would have needed a scanner to see him in the womb of Mary. The great enters the little. Reverently speaking, God passed the test of greatness.

So to all of you I wish a Christmas in which we can again deeply reflect on what actually happened on that first Christmas. Refection will challenge us that if as followers of the Lord Jesus we would be truly great in his kingdom, and then we must become the servant of all.

My families are taking me to the Bushmills Inn for Christmas and no one will sit by its famous log fire with greater joy than me, I can assure you. Pray for the half –hour Christmas Radio Broadcast interview I have given to William Crawley which will be broadcast on the Sunday Sequence BBC Radio Ulster programme on Dec 27th, DV (8.30-10.15 am). The interview took an extraordinarily Christ-centered turn. I want to thank William and his Producer Martin O’Brien for giving me this opportunity to speak so freely to so many people about my faith.

I have had a deeply spiritual response to the little book of my blog letters entitled North of Shadowlands, just published. Proceeds from this go to Macmillan Cancer Support. The book is avaible from Ambassador Productions online etc.

Again to all who have most kindly prayed for me, written to me, spoken to me, showed all sorts of kindness to me through this roller –coaster year, I say thank you. The Lord reward you all.
Gratefully,

Derick Bingham

PS. The quotations I have used from my ‘lighthouse’ accompanying this blog are taken by kind permission from The Complete Gathered Gold by John Blanchard and published by Evangelical Press (www.epbooks.org).