It’s only recently that I learned of the crucial role Elizabeth Everest played in British history. Everest was Winston Churchill’s beloved nanny and close confidante who possessed a simple faith and, it would seem, moulded her young charge with Biblical foundations.

As a result, one biographer has said that Churchill ‘linked history/culture to the biblical worldview to the extent “Christian civilisation” and its preservation was almost an obsession’.

My former ignorance is a useful reminder that we can easily fail to appreciate the importance of factors of which we are unaware, or even worse we prefer to ignore. As a Christian I would want to suggest that this is true of the many explanations that have been given for the violent upheaval that followed the tragic, indeed wicked knife attack in Stockport.              

We need to reflect long and hard on the causes of the social unrest of course, and the government needs to devise an appropriate, long-term response to the tsunami of anti-social behaviour and poisonous misinformation that created such havoc.

We need to be thankful for all those who publicly demonstrated a completely different attitude towards immigrants too, including the King who is reported to have praised the “community spirit” of Britain that “countered the aggression and criminality from a few”.

But as a Christian I want to suggest that the problems we are facing have a far more fundamental cause and demand a more radical solution than any government can adopt. Put simply I believe I need to highlight the malignant power of sin and the destructive influence of the unseen spiritual powers we find so vividly described in the New Testament.

We don’t talk about sin very much these days, but it’s a powerful force and it shapes so much of our behaviour. It prompts us to cheat and lie for example, but it can also tempt us to do the most appalling things too. I can still remember well-known foreign correspondent reflecting on the carnage he had witnessed in Ruanda.  Given the circumstances, he said, he had come to see that he was capable of acts of genocide too.

But we need to more than factor in sin because the New Testament also teaches us that our struggle is not simply against flesh and blood. It is also ‘against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm’ which is why we also need God’s help if we want to defeat them.

And here’s the good news: when God intervenes the most amazing – and unexpected - things can happen. The famous Welsh revival of 1904 is proof of that. The records show that a hundred thousand people came to faith in little over a year, and this had the most amazing social impact. One commentator for example has observed that the Bible Society in Wales couldn’t keep up with the request for their bibles and people began to pay off their bad debts. In addition to this drunkenness and crime were cut in half, and the police would often go to church services to sing in quartets because they had no one to arrest! 

Make no mistake about it, God could do it again which is why I believe our current challenges should act as a spur to concerted prayer. Even a National Day of Prayer perhaps?