Focus

After 4 days back here in Prague, at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, my theological home …..

In IBTS, at this centre of research in baptistic theology, we have a resistance to talking about ‘values’. For values are easily made interior and subjective. Each person can claim their own. There’s no real way of testing them. And the Bible does not speak in terms of values. So what does it speak of?

What the Bible does speak about is vision and drivers. Vision of the Kingdom of God brought to realisation here on earth. Drivers rooted in God’s covenants of grace. And we confess that the fullness of an irreducible vision of a renewed heavens and earth is brought to realisation through the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This humbles us, leading us into speaking of establishing, within our different contexts, convictions expressed through practices that we demonstrably engage in. Such an attitude was beautifully articulated in morning prayers today, through the words of the Christian martyr, Archbishop Romero,

It helps now and then to step back and take the long view, the Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that can be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers not messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

Crucifyingly intense

For the Lord your God is a fire consuming – a passionate God (Deuteronomy 4.24)

‘Passionate’. A better word to use in translating the Hebrew than the more usual ‘jealous’, which has bad connotations in contemporary English usage. God has such intensity of feeling of purpose, with plans to prosper and mature those made in His image and likeness.

This is the God who grips us in Jesus. Who draws us into and through the Cross of Christ to be united with His Son, calling and commanding us to invest ourselves in all that Christ represents, brings to us and is concerned about.

This is what God defines as love. Crucifyingly intense.

A people of God's inheritance

But as for you, the LORD took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of his inheritance, as you now are (Deuteronomy 4.20).

A colleague, visiting from another part of the world, asked me this week what I made of the church in the UK, and whether there was a hope of revival. I was able to give a positive and enthusiastic reply. Why?

At least three things seem to me as characteristic of authentic church, a people set apart as witnesses to the character and concerns of God. Firstly, they will be a people who have a testimony of being rescued and redeemed from a life where they were held captive by destructive and oppressive forces that dehumanised and demeaned them as persons made in the image of God. Secondly, there will be sense of struggle, being brought through a process of transformation, both personal and social, that was by no means easy and quite likely to be painful. And thirdly, there will be a growing awareness and vision of a holistic reality and quality to eternal life begun now, of a New Heavens and New Earth filled with the goodness of God’s character and also the goals that are the realisation of His concerns for humanity and the Cosmos.

Authentic church will have these three components of testimony, struggle and focus here and now. And there are increasing signs of this kind of thinking appearing among congregations throughout the land. Pray God that such a revival continues!