Spectators, priviledged participants at best

This morning I was clearing out some old correspondence in order to make room for more paper and files in my filing cabinet. Some of it was letters, and I noticed one from a man who had turned up to a service some 25 years ago for healing. I read his description of what he had experienced from God and what had happened. It was wonderful. And it got me thinking.

We are but spectators to God's loving initiative and gracious care. At best, priviledged participants in His mission of mercy. We like to think of ourselves as agents. Instruments. In some measure, in control. But we're less than that. Yes, God can use us. But it is always God's initiative. Always God's care. Always God's love. That is what we witness to when we minister in Jesus' name. When we are truly arrested and used by God, we become more acutely aware that it all seems to happen despite us, rather than because of us.

The reason for that? Because it's all about Jesus. Now in lent, as we draw closer to passiontide, it's good to remember that. From start to finish, the salvation that comes to us from the Father, through the Son and by the Holy Spirit is God's gift, goodness given in glorious generosity. Enjoy the spectacle. And allow yourself to be drawn in.

You'll invite what you like and welcome what you want

Truth is, receiving the Holy Spirit's presence and power is something we really need to want. It doesn't drop into our laps. Justification, sanctification and eschatological empowerment should go together. But how much do we want it? Be honest. The Holy Spirit would work to bring empowerment in at least three areas of our life:

Personal holiness  - cleansing you and sorting you out in attitudes to money, sex and status.
Righteous living - pursuing God's social agenda for justice and care for the marginalised
Victory over the devil - with enabling to face the attacks of demons and disease

All this can be scary and life changing. So let me ask you: are you up for it? Because you need to be if you're going to want to be in God's eternity.

Are you baptised in the Holy Spirit?

Have you been baptised by the Holy Spirit? Do you want to be?

There is no getting away from it. Every Christian needs to be baptised in the Holy Spirit. An utter drenching and infilling in God’s presence and power. It transforms us and enables us. It changes attitudes and expectations for the Christian life.

When the Holy Spirit is infilling us in real presence and power, there is a change in us. Personal and congregational moral holiness appears and is longed for; the path of justice is pursued with ethical intent and righteous resolution; miraculous intervention in signs and wonders of God’s are longed for, expected and received.

A congregation full of people who have neither an appetite for nor an experience of the fire and power of God’s Holy Spirit is going to be a church that is spiritually impotent, morally and ethically corrupted and with no real sense of hope.

But a congregation where there is a longing and looking for the fire and power to fall will be a people where hope is abundant, where personal and congregational holiness is pursued, where facilitating social justice is high on the agenda and where God will repeatedly show His miraculous hand and His wonderful favour, His Spirit bringing light and life, quickening faith and love.

Yes, my friend. You and those in fellowship with you need to be baptised in the Holy Spirit and then experience His infilling again and again. Never forget this is the heartbeat. Continue to call out to God in prayer for this. Go for it!

Fracturing Fragility

Events in recent days have graphically reminded the world of the fragility of our political and economic systems. Whether North Africa or South East Asia. The most advanced technological societies are as vulnerable as any other. We live in a fragile, fracturing world which teeters on the brink of disaster. The present world and all its apparent securities passing away. Sober up. It’s true for all to see.

To be a Christian is to become part of a new world order that is God’s antidote to what we witness. A new world built on foundations found in the life and way of Jesus Christ. Jesus said that He brings life in all its fullness. He speaks of the Kingdom of God coming in power now.

Let’s root ourselves in the reality that’s eternally stable. Live a life consecrated to holiness, hospitality and help for others. Showing Jesus through our lives and bringing hope to a lot of frightened people around us now.

Lent begins with Mark 8.31 - 9.1

a.    Jesus brought the ‘breaking-in-ness’ of the Kingdom of God to the ‘world as it is’.
b.    the ‘world as it is’ will reject the bringer of the Kingdom of God.
c.    God allows the ‘world as it’ is to continue under His governance, despite hardness of heart and disobedience continuing.
d.    Jesus calls His disciples to focus on the ‘breaking-in-ness’ of the Kingdom of God as we live in the ‘world as it is’.
e.    For us, as Jesus’ disciples, there will also be personal cost.
f.    God assures us of His presence and enabling power, as we live as witnesses of the Kingdom of God, overcoming His enemies in the ‘world as it is’.

The goal of grace

I find myself reflecting on how easily we restrict and narrow our expectation of how the Holy Spirit will act. Sometimes He confirms and sometimes affirms. Sometimes He convicts and sometimes comforts. Sometimes He heals and at times empowers. But whichever manifestation He will undertake as He visits upon us, it is best if our expectancy is for Him to come to do whatever will take us deeper into the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, at the point and in the place that we find ourselves now. Then we will not be disappointed through failed aspirations, but instead discover through His work in our lives more of life in all its fullness.

For however He visits us, it is that we might discover deepened motivation and renewed resolve to live in worship of God as disciples of Jesus Christ. This is the goal of grace.

Simply Succinct

A poem penned by my friend and colleague, New Testament scholar Rollin Grams. Says it all, really!

Communal gates are truly grand,
They ward or welcome by their frame.
For what’s let in will transform;
Or kept out, the same.

A sturdy gate, our faith in God,
A crimson beam, its only latch,
Blessèd hope, the inner quad,
Love, the cobbled path.

Let us never forget it

A friend of mine has just been baptised again in the Holy Spirit, 13 years after first being so. Their joy is palpable. Their eyes are full of life and their joy in the Lord is so full. The sheer excitement of meeting with the infilling glory and presence of the Holy God of Holy love.

And it reminds me that, however much it is right and necessary to stress intentionality and focus in the Christian life, with a consequent emphasis on life-enhancing practices and habits, it all begins with the sheer generosity of the God whose divine identity is made known to us in and through Jesus Christ. The power of His atoning sacrifice and bodily resurrection open the way for us to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And it is this infilling that is the ‘engine room’ of the Christian life. Let us never forget it.

Stories

People love 'em. TV's full of them. Magazines at checkout tills shout out with them. Stories draw us in, feed us with life (or death), influence and steer us.

At the centre of the Bible is the story of Jesus. Four stories, written from different angles. Books of stories designed to draw us into their puzzles and struggles. To meet with God in a way that changes us. Try reading one of the Gospels this way today. It will make a difference.

Hospitality, Compassion and Meaningful Involvement

We get ourselves into such worries about how to reach people. But the heart of the Gospel witness is so simple! Show hospitality to those outside the church. Express compassion to folk outside the church. And give ordinary folk opportunity to have meaningful involvement in the Christ-like thing of caring for the poor, the oppressed and marginalised. 'Draw a line' of a circle of Kingdom care and activity that can include those not yet Christians, giving fresh  purpose, reason for being and hope to those who become involved.

The place of the third of these aspects was the message today to our baptist pastors' fraternal of Albert Bogle, a parish minister who in earlier days was a rock evangelist and now chairman of an exciting 'Gospel action' charity, the Vine Trust. Many people are not hostile to Christianity: they just don't see the relevance of it to anything in the real world. Enrolling the 'not yet Christian' into activities of caring in Jesus' name can give them the opportunity to understand that Christian faith is a relationship with God that leads to involvement and investment, in the Jesus way, in His world.

Hope Sharing

A quote from a perceptive and generous book by Alan & Ele Kreider, Worship and Mission after Christendom. It really got me thinking and excited. It's so right for today!

"Hope is the most interesting currency a congregation has to spend. Christians in worship are renewed in hope: by the big story, the little stories, and their encounter with God in sacraments, words, and brothers and sisters. The New Testament does not urge Christians to evangelise other people; it commands Christians to 'give an account of the hope that is within them (1 Peter 3.15)'. The Christians' main task is not so much faith sharing as 'hope sharing'." 

(Worship and Mission after Christendom, Paternoster, 2009, p 173)

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!

A New Year Blessing

As we enter a New Year, may you find joy in the simplicity and profundity of a faith focused on Jesus Christ alone.

May Jesus, as witnessed to faithfully in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, become bigger for you this year. May deficient pictures of God, formed in your mind because of sin in your life, be shattered again; so that you might see afresh God revealed to you in and through Jesus Christ.

May all your understanding and experience of God be remade by the God of Israel, who loves you as a Father loves His Son. May He work in you by His Holy Spirit to draw you to and reshape you in His image and likeness in Jesus Christ. And may the pain of that reshaping be surpassed by the joy of a life freshly emptied, humbled and made compliant to the will of God, that you might find delight in the purpose for which God created you in Christ Jesus.

Have a blessed New Year.

Drawn to Discipleship

In looking back over these studies on the Philippian Hymn, it occurs to me that the biggest contemporary challenge to the Christian Church is the diminution and devaluing of the cost of discipleship.

Truth is, you can have a religion that speaks of the value of the individual, the importance of love and acceptance and tolerance, without having either God or Christ. Karl Marx had a good try. Ron Hubbard arguably managed it even better, in a smart move from writing science fiction into designing Scientology. Religions that appeal to human instinct are always going to be popular.

But there is nothing popular at the heart of the Christian gospel, where faith is never but a ‘decision’ to believe or an experience of existential reality. The faith that marks discipleship must be prefaced by real repentance and the cry of the Jewish shema, affirming allegiance to the God of Israel, who declares His Word of instruction and command, drawing His people into reflecting His character and participating in His actions.

As we look to celebrate and embrace the Christ of Christmas let us remember this cost to God, in terms of self-renunciation and pain, of embracing us through the Incarnation. And let us not imagine that His way can be anything but costly for those who would find and follow it.

Perspective on life

Bad deal, born with a hint of illegitimacy and dumped in straw?

'We don't get to make our lives up. We get to receive our lives as gifts. The story that says we should have no story except the story we chose when we had no story is a lie. To be human is to learn that we don't get to make up our lives because we're creatures. Christians are people who recognise that we have a Father whom we can thank for our existence. Christian discipleship is about learning to live our lives as gifts without regret.'

Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, IVP, Downers Grove, 2008, pp. 92-93.

Fragile yet fixed

“We commonly assume that the opposite of trusting God is doubting God. In the Old Testament, the opposite of trusting God is trusting something else, such as another god, or political resources, and thus trusting ourselves (Doubting God doesn’t matter so much as long as you are doubting the right God.).”

John Goldingay, Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone, Westminster John Knox Press, 2010, pp. 49-50.

The Christ Hymn - pt. 10

That Jesus Christ is ‘LORD’, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2.11)

To ascribe to Jesus the title, ‘LORD’, is to assign to Him the accolade given to the God of Israel. Here is the recognition that in Jesus all that God is and proves Himself to be is met with. It is a declaration of worship.

But more than that. Here we have a vital connection with the first part of the hymn. His complete humanity was so emphasised, in v 7 and v 8. For we are called to celebrate Jesus by embracing His humanity become our humanity, His attitude and ministry expressed through our attitude and ministry.

To admit Jesus is LORD is to approach the place of harmony and submission to Him and His call. To become His disciples. It is giving ourselves to be drawn into the reality of the God who loves and invests us as a Father, who treats us and commands us as siblings of His Son, who energises and empowers us for this new identity by His Spirit.

May this bring you joy this Advent Season.

The Christ Hymn - pt. 9

And every tongue might confess (Philippians 2.11)

Singing can be a beautiful thing. And so can celebratory talking: speaking about something or someone because you are excited, joyful.

Here is the heart of Christian worship and witness. To tell out the wonder and the joy of discovering what God has done and is doing because of Jesus Christ.

Evangelism isn’t so hard. Not when we have discovered, or rediscovered, a source of joy and delight beyond measure. To realise who God is and what matters to Him. Because we have been shown Jesus.

To be continued .....