And tell everybody what uh role you fulfilled in the military in around 2002-2003.
SPEAKER_00Um well I uh 2003 was the uh obviously the Iraq invasion. Um I had been involved in various other operations before that, we might come back to that. But uh the the planning for the potential at the time potential operations, British operations in the Gulf, I was the what was called the Joint Force Logistic Component Commander. So I was responsible for all of the logistics for British operations in 2003. That was in sort of October 2002 through till the end of the year. I was then told, asked by the Chief of General Staff to go to Washington, and I worked there in what was initially called the Office of Post-war Planning. Uh you may think there was no post-war planning for Iraq, and you would be right. Um come back to that in a minute, maybe. Um I worked with a guy called Garner, Jay Garner, and then Paul Bremer, in Washington in the Pentagon, Kuwait, and then Baghdad. And I was in Baghdad uh when the statue came down. You remember the famous picture of the statue coming down? And I was in Baghdad through through the summer of 2003.
SPEAKER_01So you've been in your mil uh uh military man throughout your entire professional life, I guess, up until 2007, is that right? You started as a cadet, age sort of thirteen, and yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00I um I I wanted to do nothing but join the military, is the truth. Um I usually share my favorite quote when I speak at conferences and so on, uh, about being a professional army man. H. G. Wells is reputed to have said that the professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind. No man of high intellectual ability, he said, would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. Well, that was me. And I was not doing particularly well academically at school, so actually the army was a pretty good place to head for, really. But I wanted to join, I joined as a cadet in in uh at age 13, went to an army college when I was 16, uh, and went to Sandhurst in 1969 and was commissioned in 1971.
SPEAKER_01And in 71, it was then off to Belfast, it was off to Northern Ireland, is that right?
SPEAKER_00Not immediately, no. In those days, uh I left in 2007, so I did 43 years, man and boy, and it was really sort of four decades worth. The first two were the Cold War years, which sadly we look like we're entering back into a cold phase, at least if not Cold War. Um, but I did four tours in Germany and I did an initial tour in Germany when I was first commissioned, did an in-service degree, and then did Northern Ireland. The troubles in Northern Ireland were really breaking out whilst I was still at Sandhurst. Um we call them the Troubles, and they finished the year I left the British Army four uh 37 years later. These these um sort of counterinsurgency operations you know go on for a long time, as we're seeing in places like Syria and Iraq and and elsewhere.
SPEAKER_01And you were in bomb disposal, is that right?
SPEAKER_00I was. I was a bomb disposal operator in Northern Nine, um dealing with IRA, UVF, UDA, and also you know, all the other things that were going on. Um and I have to say, for me personally, it was the first time I saw the brutality of a real world out there. I mean, you know, it is a brutal world out there. Um we in this country, thankfully, most of you, I hope, working in the city, working here, you know, are not faced with the with the with the worries of being blown up every day, shot and so forth. I know we do have our terrorism issues and so on, to see a little bit of that. But no, it was a pretty brutal brutal world. And I served as a bomb disposal operator and then uh sort of specialized in in um guided weapons and munitions and so on. Okay. And give us a flavor for some of the other places that you've served in your career. So Germany four times. Uh Cold War, inner German border, divided West and East Germany, Berlin divided in four in those days, four military governors in Berlin, Russian, American, British, and French. Uh, had the had the power to hang people even until the end of the Cold War in 1989. Um, obviously Northern Ireland running through all of that period, uh, and that was really dominant for my first couple of decades. But I also served in Cyprus in 1981, which we'll come back to, with the UN as a peacekeeping force, uh, classic peacekeeping operations in those days. And then the 1990s, Cold War comes to an end in 1989. Uh Iraq invades Kuwait, for those of you who remember, and I was part of First Armored Division uh pushing Iraq out of Kuwait. Uh the decision not to go on into Iraq, of course, comes back to haunt us in 2003. Um, and in the 1990s, we have Rwanda, the 800,000 people massacred, ethnic cleansing, genocide in Rwanda, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and I did three tours in the Balkans in 1995, 97, and 99 in Kosovo, and then the 2003 deployment uh to Iraq.
SPEAKER_01And I think that background of Rwanda and the Balkans in particular, that was sort of informing the sorts of things you were suggesting, and and and um you I mean you had time spent with Donald Rumsfeld in in the States and with Tony Blair uh in the run-up to the Gulf War, uh, the second Gulf War.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01And I guess those experiences were were informing some of what was going on. But what were you saying to Tony Blair, to Donald Rumsfeld?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think they were informing it. I mean, all of us carry the baggage of our experiences. I mean, that's life, isn't it? We all go through experiences working with different companies in your cases and doing different things, and we build experience and wisdom and knowledge and so on. Um, and the 90s in particular were a very important part of the formation of people like Rumsfeld and Blair, and indeed people like Kofi and Ann. Rwanda searingly made an impact on people like Kofi Annan, who felt that the UN, he was then running the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, that the UN had failed, the Balkans collapsing, uh Kosovo, Blair had stepped into Kosovo, had led the response really, and I think uh some of you may disagree, but Kosovo I think was a success. Um, Sierra Leone was a success. We began to see the the um success of of engaging with these places to stop the sort of genocide and ethnic cleansing. And the responsibility to protect comes out of that period. Blair's speech in Chicago in 1999, where he talks about the fact that we can't stand back and watch as people get massacred in these places. That all leads them to 2003. Well, obviously 2003 is a result of 2001, September the 11th, and the terrible, um, terrible uh, you know, uh uh uh planes crashing into the Twin Towers. What happens in 2003, I think, in simple terms, is hubris. And many of you will have seen this, I'm sure, in the environments you work in. Senior people getting locked into a paradigm, deciding they're gonna go down a certain route, and they get locked in hubris. And I, and going back to your point, lunching with Rumsfeld, meeting with Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld had convinced himself of the paradigm. All we need to do is get rid of Saddam. Iraq as a nation will stand up, give us a thunderous round of applause, and we'll get on and then think about the next dictator we want to get rid of. I don't want to be glib about that, and there's a big issue behind all of that, and there's some merit in it, as a plan A. The mic problem was what's plan B and what's plan C? And Tony Blair, carrying all of the years, he's a I mean, Tony is a toxic brand now. I speak a lot at universities. Many of you will probably believe that Tony Blair is a pretty toxic brand. And that happens for all sorts of reasons. I think people put their faith in him, literally. Um but also he got to this point where he was locked in the hubris, he felt he couldn't do anything else but go along with the Americans. I met with him, I knew him for various reasons from Kosovo and other times, met with him in Downing Street. I said, Look, I have no problem getting rid of Salam, but I don't think we're ready for post-war Iraq. We need to we need to hold back a little bit longer. Um but he was locked into it and felt at the time, and leadership, as many again of you will know, leadership is a lonely business sometimes. You have to make tough decisions. And if it had turned out okay, he would have been a hero. If it didn't turn out okay, so he's no he's certainly certainly not a hero, in simple terms.
SPEAKER_01And that's essentially what you said at the Chilcott inquiry later, that that there was no post-war planning.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, effectively. The planning was very thin. I went to America to Washington to join this team. Um, there was some planning going on in Washington, in the State Department, and elsewhere. Ghana pulled together this team, but basically Rumsfeld hijacked the whole thing. I think with Cheney, I think Bush had pulled himself back from this sort of stuff, but Cheney and Rumsfeld drove the whole of the post-war planning process. And it was deeply flawed. There was just not enough. I mean, I can give you all sorts of reasons for that. Just one headline. In Northern Ireland in the 70s, at the peak of the troubles, the British Army had 27,000 British soldiers in Northern Ireland. It's easy to forget this. We were losing 100 people a year at one stage. Um in Kosovo we had 60,000 Kosovo troops. And Northern Ireland is a tiny place, Kosovo is a tiny place. Iraq is a big country, the size of France. And the plan was that within six months of moving in, the Americans would reduce from 150,000 to 50,000, we would reduce to 10,000, and we would get on and just make everything would be fine. Well, okay, plan A. But the reality was we never secured the place, we never secured the environment, and and obviously we live with the consequences. All choices for all of us in life, all choices carry consequences. And we'll come back to that in the context of our faith, if you know.
SPEAKER_01I think so. Well, let's let's begin uh talking about your faith and then we'll bring the two together. So you grew up not in a not in a church-going family or anything like that, no?
SPEAKER_00No, I was adopted as a child. Um I never knew my natural father. My mother uh worked for the guy who who adopted me, and they then moved to Australia, which is where you come from, and we lived in Australia for a while. Um and they were a lovely family, but we were a classic British middle class Christian family. I mean, if you'd asked my mum and dad whether they were Christian, of course they were Christian. And they would occasionally go to church, and you know, that's the way we all were. Didn't take it too seriously. I don't know whether they were deeply committed in one sense, because we never talked about it, and that's just the way it was. So I wasn't raised in a Christian family. When I joined the military, the army take these things very seriously. It's a very it's not a Christian army. We've always had other faiths in the army, and and uh brilliantly so in all sorts of ways, but but we had a very strong Christian foundation to the military. We had a very and we're a wonderful chapel at Sandhurst and at college and so on. So for the first time I began to engage in that sort of stuff. And then when you see the terrible things that happened, you ask yourself some pretty serious questions. Why do people do this to each other? Um the Bible talks about a word called sin, which we find difficult to talk about today, I think, for various reasons. But you know, I watch the mass graves being dug up, I've seen the terrible things that people do to each other. That to me is very simply called evil and sin. And we live in a fallen world, and that makes you question. Um so that was the preamble to then uh what happened in 1981.
SPEAKER_01And do you think in the comfortable West that we are kind of inoculated from that or immunised from some of the horrors out there in the world that it's I think I think so, but I I don't think it's any different in history.
SPEAKER_00If you look back through history, there's a sort of sinusoidal wave really of people's engagement with these issues. But undoubtedly we are. We see it on the telly. Um obviously some of you, I say obviously, but some of you may have been involved in some of the incidents here in London. But for most people, we see this on the television, uh, we hear about it, we read about it, but it doesn't affect us. Our lives are relatively secure, calm, and we focus in on career and you know, bigger cars, houses, all that stuff, family and so on. Some of that for perfectly good reason. Yes.
SPEAKER_01But you you had no real sort of Christian foundation going forward. So if if I'd have asked you, aged 18, who is Jesus, what would you what would you have said of that that age?
SPEAKER_00Um I would have known who Jesus was, uh, which is not always the case today for 18-year-olds, it has to be said. I think I would have said he was a good bloke and had some interesting things to say, but that would probably be about it, really. Okay.
SPEAKER_01And then everything changed. Uh Easter, you were aged 30, is that right? You're in Jerusalem. Tell us the story of what changed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was serving with the United Nations. Um my wife and I managed to get a seat on a UN plane. There were lots of UN operations in those days. Some of you may remember in the Golan Heights of the Arab-Israeli Wars were going on and all that sort of stuff. And so there was UN planes that did the circuits, and we managed to get on one to Jerusalem, went for away for a weekend, left our two children with a friend just to have a break, four days' break. Uh, in Jerusalem, Easter weekend, happened to be my 30th birthday on that Easter Sunday, and we went to the Anglican Cathedral to attend the Easter Sunday service. Not because we were, you know, particularly uh, you know, it wasn't the most important thing, but we were in Jerusalem, it seemed a good idea to go. And it was a very nice service. I remember it quite well. Um, and over a cup of coffee, somebody said, Have we been to the Garden Tomb? Anyone heard of the Garden Tomb? One or two nods, but not many of us have heard. I hadn't heard of the Garden Tomb. It's a tomb outside the old city wall of Jerusalem. Uh General Gordon, who died at Khartoum, for those of you who know your military history, had been involved in excavating it. First century tomb, first century wine press, outside the city wall, with a hill nearby that has the shape of a skull. It's very, very reminiscent, descriptive. The Gospels describe it as the place where Jesus was uh crucified and then buried. Um so it's a it's a possible site. I I think actually it's a pretty good site. I mean the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is in the middle of Jerusalem, is a pretty awful place, frankly. So anyway, so we go out to this garden, very calm, very quiet, very peaceful. The guide that day is a Brit a retired British Army colonel. And forgive me, ladies, but I think blokes often need men to look him in the eye, kick him up the backside and say, Come on, get your mind around this and challenge us. And um, when once he knew I was a captain in the army, he gave me both barrels, basically. Um but he said at the end of it all, look, there's a first century tomb here. This may or may not be the place where Jesus was crucified and buried. This is Easter Sunday. If you go and look in the tomb, the tomb is empty. That is the crucial issue. And feeling a bit of a bread, I got up and walked over to this tomb. To this day I don't quite know what I expected to find in this tomb, but anyway, um, I land on the doorpost and I thought, actually, he's right. And I'd been sitting on the fence, really. I mean, going back to your point about Jesus, I you know, I we were church-oriented in one sense, but I didn't want to make any commitment. It was f I life was good. I was interested in career and military and all that stuff, and I I found myself thinking, actually, this is pretty important. If this tomb is empty on this first Easter Sunday morning, then that means I have to make a decision. I have to give this some serious consideration. Um, for 2,000 years, people have been following this bloke Christ. Either he rose from the dead or he didn't. If he didn't, they've been completely wasting their time. And Paul talks about that in one of his letters to the church in Corinth. Christ has not risen from the dead, we are to be pitted amongst all people, he said. And of course it's true. So it wasn't um it wasn't a Damascus Road experience. It was, you know, I wasn't I wasn't converted, inverted comments there and then, but I went away recognizing that this was serious, I needed to give it some thought. You know, I was an intelligent bloke, I needed to think about it, get off the fence one way or the other, and therefore I went away, and about three months later, I said, I'm gonna make a decision. I will become a disciple of Christ. And I've never regretted it. It um it changed all sorts of things over time, not overnight, but over time.
SPEAKER_01Let's get into some of that. Uh what difference does it make being a Christian, um, not only as a soldier, but but what difference has it made in your life to know Christ?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I mean uh we're all different. We're all unique, magical human beings. You you have the back, you know, you come from the backgrounds you have, and so forth. For me, part of the issue was identity. Who am I? And that's not linked. I don't, you know, I've never wanted to find my natural father, I've never had a burning desire for that. The guy who adopted me was a great guy and he was my father, and so forth. But nonetheless, there's a part of me once says, Who am I? What's my identity? And secondly, what's my purpose? Why am I here? Was it simply to succeed in the military? Um so you know, reflections like as they lower me into the ground, hopefully not for another you know, a couple of 20 years or so, but you know, maybe next week for all I know. But what do I want people to say about me? Is it that he was a good guy, a nice bloke, a good general, served in the military, or is there something deeper than that? What is my purpose? What am I here to achieve? So the idea of identity and purpose, and as I looked at Christ, A, I found an extraordinarily brave man, uh, physical courage, moral courage. And as a soldier, that was important to me. Maybe come back to that. But secondly, I found a guy who had a clear sense of identity. When he's baptized in the River Jordan by John, he hears God's voice say, This is my son, whom I love. And the reality is, and it sounds a bit pathetic really, for a soldier, but I know that I am loved. And the more people I meet in the world and the more, you know, terrible things that people go through, huge numbers of people I don't think, I don't think, know that. They're not loved by their parents, they're you know badly treated as children, etc. etc. So I you know, I know that I'm loved. And my purpose is to fulfill the purpose that God has for me in my life, which is now I run, I do various things, but it it's linked into this whole piece. So it it wasn't that I didn't want to be successful in the army, I I did. I wasn't that ambitious, is the truth, but but I wanted to be successful as a soldier, and I wanted to do well. But actually, beyond that, there's something else. I don't just want people to talk about me as a soldier, I want them to talk about me as a guy who values things, who's you know, has a strong sense of purpose and identity.
SPEAKER_01And how does that then help you to make the decisions that you you know you you've already spoken about when you make a decision, you've got to own the consequences of that decision. So making the decision involves a heck of a lot of courage stepping out on the branch and and and and pressing forward in that. So, how does how does knowing Christ help you to do that?
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, I think one's got to be careful about saying that it's all, you know, it is not dead easy, it doesn't all flow without any problems, but because we still face the difficulties in life. Um but if we go back to this word courage, inevitably, when when I think of courage, thought of courage, and many of you I'm sure would be the same, we tend to think about physical courage. The last VC winner, Victoria Cross winner, was the son of a very good friend of mine, a guy called Josh Leakey, and he won the VC in Afghanistan. And Josh won it because he physically was very brave on a battlefield, saving his mates and doing all sorts of stuff. Reactive to a circumstance as a trained soldier, instinctively doing something, and we recognize that and we reward it by giving a Victoria Cross or whatever, and other things. And most of us want to be physically brave, but we don't quite know whether we will be until the circumstances hit it. And it happens very rarely for most of us, but moral courage is deep different, moral courage is deeper. Um I happen to know the chairman of Carillion, or the last chairman of Carillion, and I happen to know quite a lot of people who work for Carillion. But if you look at Enron and Lehman's and RBS and so forth, you know, the companies that you work with and for and see around you all the time here, what's going on in the boardrooms with banners about the values of this company and integrity and the vision and the mission and all this stuff? What happens around the boardroom table when things are going pear-shaped, when the cash flow is drying up, when the acquisitions aren't working, and so on and so forth? Who's got the moral courage to stand up and say this is wrong? And why don't we do it? Because our whole career rests on this. Our future in the company, our future as as working in the city, our our mortgage gets paid, our children's fees get paid at school, all that. You know, all of that. So I don't want to dismiss this. This is really difficult. So moral courage is a much deeper thing. And I think Jesus displays that in spades. For me, uh the gobble I quoted, I hesitate to quote it, but nonetheless, I think it's important to say it. I was in Kosovo commanding a brigade uh with a fellow another brigade alongside me. We'd moved in uh fairly early on the basis that we thought there'd be some sort of peace agreement. There wasn't. For those of you who remember, NATO started bombing Serbia, and we began to prepare ourselves to fight our way into Kosovo. I'm then contacted by a guy called Joe Hegenar, who works for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and by the Macedonian Foreign Minister. There's a build-up of tens of thousands of refugees on the border between Kosovo and Macedonia, and the bottom line is I'm asked by both of them, will I do something? And the Macedonian Foreign Minister says, if I allow these people into this country, can you guarantee that you can look after them and they won't disappear in the country? And frankly, he was worried about a civil war in Macedonia, which is perfectly understandable. Now, to be honest, I hadn't got a clue how we were going to look after these people. But it was the right thing to do. And I'm not saying other people wouldn't have made the same decision. Maybe they would have done, and in many cases, maybe would have done. But for me, there was a military imperative, which we won't dwell on, but there was clearly a moral imperative. So I just said yes. And I went back to brigade headquarters, told the guys, we're putting down our weapons, we're going to build refugee camps, which is what we did. But there were lots of people who disagree with that decision. Uh, back in this country in the Ministry of Defence, people were very worried about it. You know, what is this guy doing? He's supposed to be planning to fight his way into Kosovo. He's now building refugee camps. Um the guy who commanded K4 was a guy called Mike Jackson, who I'd worked for quite a bit, and I knew Mike very well, and he's a you know a very capable operator, and Mike stood by me with a couple of other people, and within 20, within 48, 72 hours, the whole thing had turned itself around, and suddenly, without overplaying it, I was a bit of a hero and I got awarded a CBE. But I can tell you, in the first 24, 48 hours, I could have been sacked. And I knew that. And it was a lonely place for a while, but it was the right decision. So I don't want to oh I don't want to put myself in a vainglorious position here. It's just trying to give you an indication that you're gonna face situations like that at stages in your life. And it's too late when when that Chaos and uncertainty breaks out to say, well, I better go and wait and think about this. I mean, we don't we don't climb the steps of an aeroplane to go on a military operation and think I'd better zero my rifle tomorrow and learn how to shoot, or I better go for a run and get myself fit. We've been doing that for weeks and months and years before this deployment. And in these issues, things like moral courage and integrity and all the things we're talking about, they start now if they haven't started already. They prepare you for what for the chaos that's going to happen in the companies you work with, in the boardrooms you're going to be in, in life, when the when tragedy hits. And so on.
SPEAKER_01So to join the dots, if if you have found an identity that goes beyond your career, for instance, you can risk your career and display moral courage. And if you've got that certain secure identity in Christ, that gives you the gumption, the fortitude to be able to step out and do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I, you know, I think we've got to be careful. You know, as I say, this is not about the fact you can have moral courage. People can have moral courage without being Christians. I mean, there are good people around. But to know that there's something deeper, a foundation deeper, and that this is about an eternal consequence. And the choices I'm making today carry consequences, some of them into eternity, I think make it give you a it give you a different sense of perspective.
SPEAKER_01Very much so. So just briefly, two last questions. I asked you what you would have made of Jesus aged 18. Let me ask you the question today. Who is Jesus for you today?
SPEAKER_00Jesus is is at the center, really. I mean, I don't again, I don't want to give the wrong impression here. You know, we're all we're all life's busy, we all go around doing stuff. I'm not saying I you know think about Jesus every five minutes of the day and all that sort of stuff. But but I he's part of who I am. I often say that, you know, Christ is my identity now. The Bible talks about Christ in me and the way that I think and operate and and the decisions that I make. They're not perfect. I fail every day. You know, we all have to deal with the reality of that. But there's something about Christ which is, as I said earlier, huge respect for him, but also a recognition that a justice and righteousness and the reason he came and the reality of the resurrection means it's he's very, very special. It's very deep within me.
SPEAKER_01He is your identity. And if people are investigating Jesus uh this lunchtime, what uh what advice would you give uh how you actually get to know this Jesus?
SPEAKER_00Well, inevitably, I thought A, it's this is serious stuff. Uh and it's great that you're here for those of you who aren't Christians, it's you know, it's serious stuff. Um and therefore, A, take it seriously, and B, you have to work at it. I mean, I've got a master's degree, I'm a visiting professor at universities. When I decided to go for a degree, I had to work at it. I had to get books out and read them and study and talk to people and talk to the professors and write essays and all that stuff. So, you know, it's quite simple, really. Pick up the Bible and read it. Talk about this issue with fellow Christians, or Christian friends. Why what's going on here? Why do you think that? Have the conversations, don't sit on the fence. There comes a time in our lives where we have to make a decision. Deciding not to decide can be a perfectly valid decision. If you if you get to the point where you're just not quite clear you need more time and you want to investigate further, that's fine. I'm not I wouldn't condemn that at all. But you can't go on putting off the moment. You can't go on sitting on the fence. So investigate it, come along to gatherings, come read the Bible, do all the things that you know you're going to talk about Christianity explored and one or two other things. Take it seriously, because it's important. Brilliant. Brilliant.
SPEAKER_01A great way to finish on. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, Major General Tim Cross. Thank you. We'll have Tim back again in uh in a minute. If you want to ask him a question, do be uh thinking up uh a tricky question to skewer him with. Uh uh, but I just want to draw your attention to uh a part of the Bible uh that Tim mentioned to us. It's the baptism of Jesus, and we've had it printed for you on these cards. Uh it's a part of Matthew's gospel, one of the four biographies of Jesus, and uh the first one, the first biography of Jesus that kicks off the New Testament. And here is the first incident that really launches the public ministry of Jesus. And I think it's a great little uh vignette, really, of uh the life and times of Jesus Christ that will focus our mind around some of the issues that Tim has brought to our attention. So it's in Matthew chapter 3, and let me just read this paragraph and then I'll take you through it. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. It's a fascinating uh phrase, that the heavens were opened. Usually these days, and certainly in England, when we hear that phrase, the heavens were opened, we're thinking of rain, right? But uh in the Bible they meant it more literally. What would it look like to tear open heaven and look inside? Well, tantalizingly, we get a glimpse here. What does it look like when you tear open heaven and you look inside? Actually, what you see is there is a father who is belting out pride and praise and joy in his son, Jesus, and filling him with the Holy Spirit. That's what verses 16 and 17 are all about. Apparently, behind and beyond and beneath this world, there is a father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. There is a family where we belong. We've thought already this afternoon about belonging, about a sense of identity, about a sense of where you get that sense of self and that sense of purpose from. And the Bible says, well, there is an ultimate family, a family where you can belong, a family where you can join the family and know the love of a father, know the filling of that same Holy Spirit, know that Christ, that same Son of God, as your own identity. That's a beautiful thought, isn't it? A beautiful thought that beyond and beneath and before and behind this world there is a family of love. That's a wonderful thought. But it can also sound like cloud cuckoo land, can't it? When we look out at a world that's full of Kosovos and that's full of Rwandan genocides, that's full of Iraq wars, that's that's full of the troubles. When we think of the world, we don't just think of light and life and love. We think of a whole lot of darkness and death and disconnection, don't we? And the Bible is very clear that we live in a world that is not as it should be. But it's also clear that the world is not as it should be because we are not as we should be. There is a profound link between the darkness that is out there in the world and the darkness that is in here in our hearts. I wonder if you felt that uncleanness, that darkness, that stain. Certainly, these people coming to the Jordan River, they certainly felt that darkness, that uncleanness, that stain, because they wanted to get baptized. Baptism is just a word that means a wash. And here is this ritual wash that points to the fact that we all need cleansing deep within. Have you ever wanted a power shower inside? I've wanted a power shower inside many, many times. That sense of being cleansed from within. I had a uh a friend who was involved in marriage counseling, and uh a guy came to him who had absolutely wrecked his marriage, wrecked his business, wrecked his whole family through the decisions that he had made. And this man said to my friend, I wish I could take my whole life, bundle it up in a big washing machine, and put it on the hottest wash until all the grit and the grime is gone. Have you ever wanted that? I've wanted that many, many times. And I don't know if you find those moments by yourself where you're just standing in the queue at Tesco's or last thing at night and you think about that thing that you said or the thing that you didn't do. Maybe it was last week, maybe it was ten years ago, I don't know, but you just you feel unclean. You feel you need that cleansing. My daughter Ruby is uh three years old, but as she was learning to talk, uh there was one word she kept on saying more than any other. We couldn't figure out what it was. She just kept on saying, doy doy doy doy doy doy doy, doy doy doy. No idea what this what this meant. And then uh one afternoon I was just doing the washing up and looking out the window, and it was one of those sort of moments where you remember the stupid things that you've done. And I'd remembered something that I'd said the last week, and I just remember doing the washing up and just thinking, dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And in the corner, Ruby says, doi, doy, doy, doy, doy, doy, doy. I must say it a lot, right? She's picking up on this. Do you ever have those moments where you just feel about that that sense of uncleanness? Yeah, that's that's kind of a silly example. A far more serious example is I was touring around uh Auschwitz a few years ago. And if we're talking about uh centers of notorious evil, well, uh Auschwitz is is up there for the 20th century. And uh and as I was going around, there were these two phrases that I kept on saying, and they were so visceral, I I had to articulate them, even under my breath. And as I was looking at the Nazi evil, the the darkness that was out there, the uncleanness that was out there, I kept on saying this phrase. It's a mild swear word, so I probably shouldn't say it, but I just kept on saying you bees, you bees. It's a mild swear word. It has uh A S T A R D S, eight letters in it. And I just kept on saying this word, you bees, you bees, you bees. And if you were there, you would say the same because you look at that Nazi evil and you think, what an unclean world, what a dark world. But then hot on the heels of that phrase, I kept on saying a second two-word phrase. I kept on saying, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And from one perspective, that's that's really like why would I say I'm sorry? I wasn't there. I was born decades after this evil happened, but but somehow everybody in the tour group was the same. We all had that sense of I'm sorry. We all that had that sense that there's darkness out there, and you point the finger at the evil, and it is evil. But there's also three fingers pointing back, and on some level, the darkness out there is reflected in here. And I need a bath too. I need a power shower on the inside. And these people, these people just get honest, they just get real, and they show up at the failures convention. That's what the baptism is. It's the failures convention. It doesn't sound like it'd be too uh popular, does it? You know, I'm not sure the signage would work very well here at St. Peter's the Barge if it said, you know, failure's welcome. Come one, come all, you must be a loser. But that's what these people do. They they recognize something about the darkness within. Can you recognize that darkness within? It's why Jesus came. He said there's a darkness within, and you want to sort that out. You want to get it sorted out by God now, because you don't want to get trapped in that darkness. The Bible says we live forever. We don't want to get trapped in that darkness forever, do we? We want to get this sorted out. This is why Jesus comes. And so here are these people, they're wanting to get the bath, wanting to get the wash, and who should show up but the perfect pure Son of God? This is a shock, isn't it? It shocks John the Baptist, verse 14. He wants to stop Jesus doing it. He's saying, you know, I should wash, you should wash me, I shouldn't wash you. And Jesus' response to him is essentially to say, look, John, it should be this way around, because I'm going to join you in your filth so you can join me in my family. That's really the story of the whole Bible. You could write that across every page in the Bible. The Son of God comes from that family into our filth, so that we in our filth can join him in that family. That's the truth of the Bible, really. And so what does Jesus do? He comes and joins them at the failures convention. Isn't that stunning? He joins all the messy people. He is numbered among the transgressors. That's what uh an old prophecy said of Jesus 700 years earlier. When the Son of God comes, he's going to be numbered with the transgressors. He's going to be counted alongside all the other messy people. And here is Jesus coming to join us in our mess. And if you keep on reading through the Gospels, you'll see the way that He takes on our predicament. He takes on our darkness. He takes on all our rivals, all our foes, and he gains the victory over them. If you read through the Gospels, you'll see how Jesus takes on Satan. He gets tempted in the very next chapter of the Bible, and yet he gains the winner over temptation. He gains the winner over sickness. He gains the winner over death. He gains the winner over the forces of nature. And on the hell uh on the cross, he gains the victory over the forces of hell as well. He joins us in our filth to such a degree that on that cross he takes it on himself. The sky turns black, he enters into that darkness for us, because he wants to take it for us. And he rises up again and he says, I've taken your filth. Do you want my family? What does that mean? Do we want his family? Well, do you see how the Spirit of God in verse 16 descends on him like a dove? If you come to Jesus, he'll give you his spirit to be your spirit. That would fill you up. That would give you a sense of self and purpose and dignity and courage to walk out into the world, to have Christ's own spirit as your spirit. And then verse 17, we get his father as our father. We can hear heaven say of us, You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased. That would give you a sense of identity, wouldn't it? You know, Tim was adopted twice in life, actually. He was adopted when he was one year old. And he was adopted when he was 30 years old as well. Because when you join Jesus and you say, Jesus, I want you to be in me, to be in my life. You confess to the darkness, you confess to the sin, you join the failures convention, you know, meet here every Wednesday lunchtime. You're very welcome here to the Failures Convention, right? You join the Failures Convention, you put your hand up, you say that there's darkness in me too, but you say, Jesus, I want you, and you become born again. That's the Bible phrase. Born again, adopted into the family, and you get Christ's Father as your father, Christ's Spirit as your spirit, and Christ's future as your future. You can walk out into this world with a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, a sense of belovedness. Is that what you need? The Bible says we all need it. We all need that cleansing, we all need that identity, we all need that purpose.