CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Faith is not simply about adhering to certain beliefs
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The young man passed Stuart as he walked beside the River Ness. “All of a sudden,” Stuart tells me, “I felt what he was feeling – deep sadness, emptiness, the pain of a broken relationship.”
Stuart sensed a prompting from God: ‘Go and speak to him!’, and introduced himself to the passer-by, sharing the insights he’d been given. ‘These things are true,’ the man admitted. And Stuart said: “God wants you to know that he knows about it. God wants to make a difference in your life.”
Stuart Brash, an Inverness-based evangelist, tells me his own story of coming to faith.
As a young policeman from Bonnyrigg, a heavy drinker with an anger problem, Stuart was troubled by the thought of death, which he often saw in the course of his work, and of what lay beyond it. He was fearful of the hell he’d heard about as a child in church.
After being surprised one day by an unexpected experience of God’s presence, Stuart began attending church and eventually cried out to Jesus Christ: ‘Yes, I repent of my sins. I believe you died for me. There are things in my life I can’t break free from. Please forgive me and set me free.’
His life was changed. The fear of hell was gone. Colleagues noticed PC Brash was no longer the ‘mean machine’.
Subsequently, Stuart left the police.
Most of his working life (he retired in January) was spent in teaching – he specialised in supporting children with visual impairment and came to Inverness to be co-ordinator of the Highland Council’s vision support unit.
Stuart has a God-given gift of drawing close to people and sharing the Christian good news. Over the years, he has preached in churches and on the streets in the UK and elsewhere, seeing hundreds of people coming to faith in Christ.
He is often given insights into people’s needs – as was the case with the man beside the Ness – which he shares with them, revealing God’s compassion and opening their hearts to the freedom found through saying ‘Yes!’ to Jesus.
Stuart also tells me about praying with many who are sick, and seeing them both healed, and coming to faith. This raised questions to which there are no answers: why are just a few healed in a world where so many are broken and wounded?
But Stuart seems to me to be utterly genuine, full of love for God and for others: a bold, humble, passionate man, through whom many lives have been transformed.
Stuart Brash reminds us that Christian faith is not simply about adherence to certain beliefs, but about encounter with a life-changing, liberating God who shows us just how much we are loved.
